Deadly Affair: A Georgian Historical Mystery (Alec Halsey Crimance) (36 page)

“My dear sir. Mr. Halsey. My profusely humble apologies that a mute giant obstructs that door but I am unable to do as you request. I feel it would be for the best to await the arrival of Lord Halsey whose liberty of conversation is required in this matter.”

Mention of his nephew cooled some of the heat from Plantagenet Halsey’s tone but he was no less belligerent.

“
Liberty of conversation
? This isn’t a whist party or some dowdy dowager’s damn soiree! There isn’t time for conversation!”

“There is always time for conversation, dear sir. And I must insist. It is to his lordship that I will most ardently address my concerns.”

“
Concerns
?” The old man blustered, a wild-eyed look about at the cluster of onlookers before turning back to the proprietor. Taking a step closer he growled in an under voice, “Have you any idea what is going on behind that door?”

The proprietor’s eyes went wide and his jaw dropped.

“It is not this select establishment’s practice, nor will it ever be while I am owner, to have ideas of any kind about what takes place behind the doors and in the rooms occupied by my esteemed guests, Mr. Halsey,” he enunciated with a sniff, and loud enough for the cluster of onlookers to overhear. “Barr’s caters to the quality—”

“—quality of the gold in the coin we carry if enough of it crosses your greasy palm!”

The snigger and a snort came from one of the footmen eavesdropping, who instantly dropped his chin to his chest and shuffled behind the elderly Miss Musgrave, back up against the wallpaper.

“Sir! Mr. Halsey!” blustered Mr. Barr. “I must tell you that...”

But Plantagenet Halsey had stopped listening. As much as he wanted to beat his cane over the head of the pompous Mr. Barr, such was his angry frustration, instead he turned a shoulder to Tam, who, at the jerk of the old man’s grizzled head, came close to his ear.

“Have the girl take you up to Mrs. Bourdon’s rooms via the servant stair. If any of the staff give you trouble you’ve my permission to knock ’em down. Your paramount duty is the care of Mrs. Bourdon. Understand me?”

Tam nodded grimly and with a signal to Janie, the two turned and disappeared, Janie leading the way through the labyrinth of servant passages down to the kitchens.

Thinking the old man had sent the youth and the maid to fetch Lord Halsey, the proprietor said patronizingly, “I have already requested Lord Halsey’s presence, sir. I merely await his pleasure.”

“Rightly gave you the brush off, aye?” Plantagenet Halsey again pointed his cane at the servant guarding the door. “What do you expect his lordship can do about Mrs. Bourdon’s condition? He ain’t an apothecary and he ain’t—”

“Yes! Yes! If you please, sir, there is no need for you to state the obvious. Had I known—”

“—a man-midwife.”

“—the young woman’s
predicament
was so advanced I would have advised her that taking up residence in the Arch apartment was not the most wisest of choices. Barr’s is a respectable address for well-bred and genteel clientele. A private residence would have better suited her purpose.” He looked over the old man’s grizzled hair at the elderly Miss Musgrave who had finished rummaging in her reticule for nothing in particular and who was now boldly staring at him, and dropped his voice to that of a conspiratorial whisper. “Had I known then what I only discovered this morning, I would not have taken
Mr.
Bourdon’s immoral coin, despite him paying handsomely for the exclusive use of the Arch apartment, and I mean to refund him the balance of his immoral coin as soon as it can be arranged.”

“Aye?
Immoral coin
? What are you flabbering on about, Barr? The woman in that room is married and if you are implying anything else, I—”

“So she would have everyone believe,” Barr bravely interrupted, voice a thin whisper. “But, after what was revealed to me this morning, I have serious doubts the marriage ceremony conducted in the Arch apartment she now occupies was a Christian union under the auspices of Church and state.”

The old man ground his teeth.

“I don’t care for your insinuations, Barr. Explain yourself!”

Despite his guest’s blazing gaze, the proprietor took a step closer.

“Tell me, sir, is it not an odd set of circumstances that less than a twelvemonth ago the young woman was married to Mr. Bourdon in the very rooms she now occupies, not in a house of God as is the usual and proper place, and by the strangest of clerics, a shabby fellow who looked more beggar than vicar, two
servants
acting as witnesses to the union. Naturally I respected Mr. Bourdon’s wish for privacy and I did not think it so odd at the time—”

“Bourdon’s untied purse strings stopped your brain turning a cog or two, did it, Barr?” Plantagenet Halsey quipped, though his ears had prickled at the description of the clergyman: It had to be Blackwell. He waved his cane. “You said
circumstances
. What else?”

The proprietor smiled a thin, self-satisfied smile of superiority, believing his guest was beginning to incline to his way of thinking.

“The newly married couple spent a week ensconced in the apartment and then they departed, for where I know not! Mrs. Bourdon has stayed in that very apartment upon three separate occasions since the day of her marriage, arriving alone, without her husband, and in the most improper of circumstances!”

There was a squeaking gasp and then a cough. It came from the elderly Miss Musgrave. In his self-deluded self-confidence that the uncle of Lord Halsey was beginning to show signs of coming round to his way of thinking, Bernard Barr had allowed his voice to rise above a whisper. He now quickly coughed and lowered it again.

“And although I had my suspicions at the time, I am not one to disbelieve my guests, but after what I discovered in the pages of the letter addressed to me by—”

“Improper?” interrupted Planagenet Halsey, gaze hardened; his question was whisper quiet.

“Would you not call it improper for a female to stay at a lodging house without her maid in tow, and bringing with her a child of an age that anyone who can add two and two would soon realize was not born in the wedlock of her marriage to Mr. Bourdon?”

“Did she receive visitors while she was stayin’ here?” the old man asked, conveniently ignoring the proprietor’s pertinent question.

Bernard Barr’s eyes went very wide. “I beg your pardon? This, Mr. Halsey, is a reputable establishment!”

“So other than the child, Mrs. Bourdon saw no one, no gentlemen callers whatsoever?”

“As to that, sir, my position as proprietor of this most esteemed establishment makes it impossible for me to answer you,” Barr replied, face alight with color, thinking of her most recent caller just that very morning; a well-dressed gentleman with a bouquet of flowers whose exit had been melodramatic to say the least, had raised many an eyebrow and too many questions.

So Mrs. Bourdon had had visitors and male visitors at that! That did not mean there was anything improper in the visits, and Plantagenet Halsey refused to believe there had been, whatever Barr’s insinuations to the contrary. He would stick with his first impression of Mrs. Bourdon until he was told differently by the woman herself. He sighed. He was beyond being annoyed with this moralizing windbag and having given Tam what he considered ample time to enter the apartment via the servant stair, his anxiousness for the welfare of Miranda Bourdon returned tenfold and he pointed the tip of his cane at the inert beefy footman, but addressed the proprietor. “It won’t be a reputable establishment for much longer if Mrs. Bourdin don’t receive the care and consideration she and her unborn babe require and you are the cause of their deaths! Now tell your big oaf to move his elephantine carcass and open that door; and don’t give me tripe about needin’ my nephew to be present!”

“But, Mr. Halsey, sir, I told you. I—”

“Wait up!” the old man interrupted on a sudden thought, cane swishing from immoveable footman to proprietor. He poked Barr gently in the chest. “What letter?”

Barr’s gaze lowered to the cane held to his chest and he quaked.

“Letter?”

“You said you discovered somethin’ about Mrs. Bourdon sent to you in a letter. Who sent it? When?”

“Ah! Yes, the letter. A most illuminating piece of script that confirmed my suspicions about the guest in the Arch apartment and her—”

The old man poked the proprietor’s chest.

“Who. When.”

Barr laughed nervously and touched his fingers lightly to the end of the cane. It was not removed.

“I received the letter only today, sir. It was delivered by this morning’s post and I happened to be reading its most astonishing contents when the gentleman visitor to this apartment made his hurried exit from the establishment.”

“Who.”

“Lady Rutherglen.”

“
Rutherglen
?”

Barr gave an involuntary yelp, not in response to the old man’s thunderous declaration but because the cane jabbed him hard in the sternum.

“Apologies,” Plantagenet Halsey muttered and let drop the cane. “You can have that letter fetched. I’m very sure Lord Halsey will be most interested in her ladyship’s slanderous discourse! And now,” he added with another sigh, his cane swishing up and across to point at the immobile footman guarding the door to the Arch apartment, “tell that gorilla to move!”

“But, sir, that’s what I tried to tell you: I cannot do as you command for two very good reasons.”

“Damne! For God’s sake, man! What bloody reasons?”

The two footmen, Miss Musgrave, her maid and three guests, a beknighted farmer and his wife and young son, who had just joined the eavesdropping party on the landing, all leaned forward, waiting the response to the old man’s explosive question.

“Firstly: the door has been locked from the inside and secondly, and I presumed it was at Lord Halsey’s instigation and thus that is why I wish to speak with him because, as your eyes can surely attest, there is indeed a mute footman the size of a gorilla obstructing access to the door. And if he does not belong to Lord Halsey, then I, like you, sir, am just as befuddled by whose order he guards that apartment.”

Janie found the spare key to the servant door of the Arch apartment hanging on a hook in the housekeeper’s pantry and took it without asking. She did not have the time or the inclination to explain herself. And to do so would surely cause unnecessary gossip about her young mistress; events would soon conspire to do that anyway. The red-haired young man did not seem to mind her theft, in fact his grim smile held a wisp of encouragement as she slipped the key off the hook and pushed it up her sleeve out of sight, holding it in place with her arms folded. She prayed it did not slip and fall with a clatter to the stone floor as they darted amongst the kitchen servants too busy preparing the evening meals to be bothered questioning the trespass of two servants unknown to them and thus belonging to guests staying upstairs.

When Janie had earlier gone up to the rooms via the narrow servant stairwell carrying a vase for the flowers, she was surprised and alarmed to discover the servant door locked. She had scratched on the paneling and called for her mistress and receiving no response had been about to descend the stairs to take the carpeted corridor used by guests to enter via the main door when she had heard a faint calling out. It was Mrs. Bourdon and an involuntary fretful groan alerted her to the possibility that her mistress may have gone into early labor; that the door remained locked heightened Janie’s dread. And then Mrs. Bourdon had cried out for her to fetch the friend of Mr. Plantagenet Halsey; the youth with the red hair. He could help her, and Janie was not to send for a physician or a man-midwife, only for the youth with the red hair. And to be quick about it!

Janie had promised but was skeptical, yet reasoned that a woman suffering the pangs of childbirth could have whatever she wished if it lessened her suffering. What the fresh-faced Thomas Fisher could do for her she had no idea. He was not a man-midwife and he was much too young to be a physician. Yet, when she glanced over her shoulder, as he followed her up the circular stone stairwell, she was reassured by his look of grim determination.

The key turned in the lock and opened the door, much to Janie and Tam’s relief. Tam let Janie go on ahead, the girl giving him a queer look before she bustled into the bedchamber from the sitting room because he was shrugging out of his frockcoat.

Flowers were strewn across the carpet from the windowseat to the fireplace hearth, where a fire still crackled low, as if flung out violently, the delicate petals of fuchsias, red sage, and dahlias crushed, and stems broken. Everything else in the room: tapestry and damask cushions on the windowseat, two wingchairs, a low walnut table, and a basket holding needlework had, in Tam’s quick appraisal, not been disturbed. There being no signs of struggle or distress, other than the wanton destruction of a bouquet of autumn flowers, Tam followed the maid across the room, throwing his frockcoat across the back of one of the wingchairs. Yet, on the threshold of the bedchamber he stopped and waited. It would not do to barge in unannounced. Despite the maid saying Mrs. Bourdon had asked for him, he waited to be beckoned within.