City of Secrets (5 page)

She didn’t understand what was wrong and didn’t know how to explain it to him, so she waited. Surely the next time—or at least after a little while, when she grew to know what he wanted, what she wanted—then she would feel the passion that she had anticipated, the passion that made Teddy cry out when he had spilled himself inside her, then collapse, wet and depleted, beside her, murmuring endearments into her ear before he fell asleep.

She tried to feel more, and each time she thought she would, for his caresses never failed to rouse her, his kisses to make her want more. But there was no more. After a certain point, she felt no further arousal. Instinctively, she tried to do it differently, to lie on her side or even in some other room, but Teddy liked their own bed and his way of making love. So she began to pretend, to echo his cries and whispered endearments. After all, it was not Teddy’s fault that she had expected too much. There was no reason to deny him his pleasure.

Teddy never questioned her about it, so she thought he must not have noticed her lack of response. Perhaps that really was all there was to it.

They went home to St. Louis and everyone thought they were happy. Maddie thought so, too, except for that one little thing, except for ... no, that had nothing to do with Teddy. John Jerome died suddenly, a year after his daughter’s marriage, of a heart attack. Constance sold the house and moved back to her family’s home in Charleston, and Maddie had no one left—no one else—to talk to. Teddy’s attentions to her were no less ardent, but they were all she had, and he was not always home. He did not work, but he always had something to do, always had friends to meet at the racetrack and other places she could not go with him. She gave him money to do it, because that seemed all she could give freely. It was the only excitement he had, and Teddy craved excitement.

Teddy didn’t work because his grandfather, like Maddie’s father, had been a self-made man, building a fortune quickly in the days when such things could be done in America, and his father had taken over a chain of furniture stores that had begun with one in Kentucky and then spread across the South. But by the time Teddy was old enough to join the family firm, there were no challenges left in it. Teddy did not see why he should work if he did not have to, and finally he thumbed his nose at the stern visage of his grandfather staring down from the portrait over the fireplace, shrugged off his father’s threat to disinherit him, and left home declaring he would find his own fortune.

Then he had met Maddie and had not needed to make a fortune of his own after all. And eventually he had run away from her, too.

#

Maddie reached for one of the hotel’s huge white towels and rose slowly out of the bathwater.
What had made her think of that?
It had been her own behavior that had sent Teddy away; she had become jealous of his friends, his other interests. She had been horrid to him—that much was clear now—and when a man received no sympathy in his own home, he could scarcely be expected to remain there. The very night Teddy left for Lexington—or so she thought—she had accused him of taking more interest in his stupid horses than in her. She knew it was not true; poor Teddy had tried to coax her out of her sullen fit, but she had been selfish, hugging the hurt to her.

It had never, until now, occurred to her that he might have been running from something else, something more deeply rooted that she had never even seen, much less understood.

Maddie put the towel over her head and rubbed furiously, as if to force such morbid fancies out of it. Teddy never let such considerations trouble him; he had much more likely gone off on some tremendous lark, thinking no more of it than as a night on the town and expecting to come home any day to tell Maddie of his adventures. He would not have expected her to be concerned, Maddie had told Devin Grant, but she
had
been concerned—and selfish enough to wish Teddy preferred her company to anyone else’s. And yes, a little jealous, too, of the freedom Teddy did not feel he needed to give up, even when she had sacrificed her own.

She splashed cologne all over herself, then dusted her long legs and smooth arms with talcum powder. Wrapping her silk negligee around her newly softened and scented body, she went into her bedroom, where Louise was waiting to brush her hair dry and put it up for dinner. She sat down at her dressing table and turned her back so Louise could begin, and only then did she catch sight of her scowling reflection in the mirror. She took another deep breath, placed her fingers against her forehead to smooth away the lines, and smiled up at Louise.

“Mother used to tell me to erase a frown that way. Did it work?”

“It seems to be gone, at all events,” Louise said, adding with a rare touch of affection, “but I suspect a smile would have done the job just as well.”

“Yes, I’m sure you’re right, Louise,” Maddie said, catching Louise’s hand and giving it an affectionate squeeze. “Thank you.”

“Mr. Drummond would like to have a word with you,” Louise said, as if regretting stepping ever so slightly out of her place. She always referred to her husband as Mr. Drummond, even when Maddie addressed him as Oliver or Ollie, as if it were up to Louise to maintain a standard of polite behavior for her mistress to follow.

“Tell him to come in,” Maddie said, violating yet another of Louise’s standards.

“Now, ma’am? You are in ... you are not dressed.”

“I am, as Aunt Charlotte used to say, ‘in my disability,’ which is not quite
not dressed.
Anyway, you are both practically family and have known me to be far less proper, haven’t you?”

Louise did not reply to that, but opened the door to signal her husband, who was waiting in the sitting room. A slight, middle-aged man with the kind of bland looks one scarcely remembered five minutes after meeting the man attached to them, Oliver Drummond slipped into the room so quietly that Maddie was unaware of his presence until Louise had returned to do her hair and Maddie looked up into the mirror.

“Hello, Oliver. Have you had a busy day, too?”

“Yes, Mrs. Malcolm, although not so profitable perhaps as your own. As requested, I attempted to verify Mr. Devin Grant’s references. I found nothing against him.”

“But?”

“But I found very little for him, either. He obviously exists, for we have both seen him, I from across the street as he approached his office this morning. His agency does in fact perform the services expected of a detective firm, but it does not seem that Mr. Grant himself takes a very large part in them.”

Maddie’s frown reappeared. “Do you mean to say he is some sort of imposter?”

“No. As you know, the Pinkerton agency has dealt with him in matters one might expect such a firm to handle. Furthermore, he is accepted by everyone employed by him as the head of the agency. But that appears to be a nominal position only.”

“Why do you say ‘appears’?”

“Because I have been able to peruse a number of confidential police files, which specifically mention his name as assisting the police in their inquiries, or as providing a significant clue in an investigation. And yet, none of this appears in any public account of the cases in question, as if Mr. Grant did not wish the publicity that would ordinarily be invaluable to a firm seeking to expand its clientele, or even simply to stay in business. And there was an odd thing this afternoon....”

“Yes?”

“I observed the office after you left, to see where he would go at the end of the business day. His clerks had all left by six o’clock, and the last of them locked the door. Mr. Grant himself, however, appeared never to leave the building.”

“It does have two entrances, you know.”

“Yes, but from where I stood I had the door you left by in my direct line of vision and the main entrance reflected in a window across the street. No one left by either door after quarter past six.”

By this time, Louise, who gave no indication of having heard a word of this conversation, had nearly finished with Maddie’s hair. There was a brief silence as she slipped in the last of the hairpins; then Maddie turned around to look directly at Oliver Drummond.

“Do you wish me to continue this line of inquiry, Mrs. Malcolm?” he asked when she remained lost in thought.

Maddie sighed. “Yes, I’m afraid we must. It is all too irregular. I’d rather get on with something more to the point, but I cannot now simply drop Mr. Grant and look for another agency, not so long as these little mysteries hover around him. Perhaps it might be best to wait and see if he actually does any work on my case, and what sort of work it is.”

“Very well, Mrs. Malcolm.”

“Oh, by the way, Ollie, I have
snagged,
as Florence Wingate would say, an introduction to Peter Kropotkin. Wasn’t that clever of me?”

She smiled when Oliver did look surprised. “Very clever, indeed, Mrs. Malcolm. You may soon be doing my work for me.”

“Not at all, although I’d rather do that than try to figure Devin Grant out,” Maddie remarked tartly.

Oliver left so that Louise could dress Maddie for dinner—yet another supper for two with Louise, since as Florence had told her with a martyred sigh, the Wingates were engaged to dine with cousins of Geoffrey’s in Kensington.

Maddie stood still while Louise fastened the back of her favorite black satin evening gown, trimmed with jet on the full sleeves and at the hem, and watched herself in the mirror as Louise’s ministrations narrowed her waist and brought out the white curves of her breasts at the low, wide neckline. She wondered idly what Devin Grant would think of her in this gown and was suddenly conscious of a stab of regret that he was not at this moment waiting for her in the lobby. She could almost see him there, tall and handsome in evening clothes, watching admiringly as she made her entrance and took his arm to be led into the dining room, the focus of every other woman’s envious gaze.

She sighed. “Well, Louise, shall we go down?”

As good as his word, Laurence Fox sent a note around to Maddie’s hotel to say he had “located” Peter Kropotkin, and much to her amazement, he added that the great theorist would be at Newmarket the very day Maddie was to attend the races with the Wingates. She did not question this wonderful coincidence. Certainly it was the first promising development in a search that thus far had resulted in no more than Maddie’s falling into bed exhausted each night, Oliver Drummond’s wearing an increasingly gloomy frown every day, and Devin Grant’s sending frequent but ever more cryptic messages to her hotel that he was “pursuing inquiries.”

And so it was that on a sunny Tuesday morning, the party of four, accompanied by Florence’s maid and a large picnic basket, departed from Liverpool Street Station in a private compartment in a Great Eastern railway carriage for the sixty-mile trip to Newmarket town. There, thanks to Mr., Fox’s prescience, they found a hired carriage waiting to convey them in comfort to the racetrack, where they arrived unwearied and comfortable and eager to plunge into the activity going on all around the Rowley Mile.

“Oh, look there,” Florence said, as soon as she had arranged her pale gray walking skirt gracefully around her on her chair and raised her silver field glasses to survey the surrounding boxes. “There is Mrs. Keppel in the royal enclosure. That means Alexandra won’t be here today. And there, I believe, is Sir Ernest Cassel, but I do not see the Prince of Wales.... Oh, do look what a dreadful hat that other young woman has on, Madeleine. She must be one of Mrs. Keppel’s protégées, but Alice ought not to allow her out in public until she has learned to dress!”

Maddie, however, had put down her own glasses after finding herself being stared at in return by a shady-looking person with a black mustache. She was aware that she made a lovely picture, in her dark-blue and white princess dress with white lace at the throat that fell to the waist and made her chestnut hair look even richer under her straw hat trimmed with blue ribbon. She had, after all, spent nearly two hours that morning submitting to Louise’s fussing to make herself beautiful, so she could not complain if men looked at her. But she did not have to look back.

She turned instead to watch Mr. Fox, who was setting up his camera to take in a general view of the course. The Rowley Mile course, he had informed them in the train on the way to Newmarket, was named for King Charles II’s favorite hack. The track itself was shaped like a V, the last part of which ran downhill after the turn and then uphill again. In long-distance races, Laurence said, little of the beginning could be seen, giving rise to the joking complaint that spectators were obliged to hang about in Suffolk in order to see a race that was run in Cambridgeshire, the course being situated just on the border between the two counties. Today, however, most of the activity was centered on the one-mile point, where a considerable crowd had gathered close to the fence and below the stands.

They were orderly on the whole, possibly due to the presence of the prince at today’s meeting, but Maddie preferred to think it was the lovely spring weather that made them all—or nearly all—look like such pleasant people. She scarcely tried to suppress her own rising excitement at ... she wasn’t sure at what, but it was the kind of day when anything could happen.

All at once she had an inkling of what attracted Teddy to race meetings. It wasn’t the race itself, but the occasion. It might have been the excitement too, the suspense of not knowing what the outcome of the race would be, but she suspected that most of all, Teddy liked being with so many people like himself, all enjoying themselves at what was, after all, just another kind of game.

Laurence Fox was surveying the crowd, too, but with a professional eye. Maddie noticed that he looked differently at people when he was considering them as subjects than when he was merely making conversation with them. He shaded his eyes with his hand as he stared intently across the course, made up his mind about his composition, and turned to set up his camera.

#

She should have insisted on going to the races with Teddy, Maddie could see now. At the time, she had thought he would dislike having a clinging wife always hanging on his sleeve, so she let him have his independence. Perhaps he had not really wanted it, but it was too late now. She had let him go and had stayed home by herself, more confined—and lonely—than she had ever been as an unmarried girl.