Deadly Affair: A Georgian Historical Mystery (Alec Halsey Crimance) (40 page)

Janie was busy scurrying to and fro between bedchamber and kitchen, fulfilling errands for Tam. At one stage two wide-eyed but head down maids followed her carrying a large copper and fresh sheets. She worried about her mistress and the progress of her labor, and yet she was conscious of Lord Halsey watching her from the windowseat. She even dared to steal a long sideways glance at him when he turned to the window at the noisy arrival of a carriage and six as its occupants alighted in the cobblestoned street below. He was the handsomest man she had ever seen, with his black wavy hair, olive skin and angular profile. Resplendant in velvet and lace, he was even more handsome than Mr. Talgarth, who left her tongue-tied and giddy when he came calling on her mistress.

Under present trying circumstances, and because she knew she would blush rosily if his lordship dared to address her, she decided to get on with her errands as if the nobleman was not in the room. This tactic worked well until his lordship’s valet materialized in the servant doorway. She was looking at her feet and not straight ahead and so collided with Mr. Hadrian Jeffries, upsetting not only the tray he was carrying but creasing the front of his immaculate frockcoat.

Watching the maid and his valet jostle each other, the girl mumbling profuse apologies while an outraged but contained Jeffries brushed the creases from his frockcoat, provided Alec with some much needed relief from the couple of fraught hours spent sitting still and silent in the windowseat listening to the cries and moans of a woman in the throes of childbirth emanating from the next room. He had hoped the physician would arrive soon. By the reckoning of his gold pocket watch, it was at least two hours, possibly longer, since Ketteridge had sent a message apologizing for being delayed; a small child with burns and an elderly patient who had slipped and broken his femur at the Kings Bath.

Not many minutes after Ketteridge’s message, a surprising note from Lady Rutherglen, delivered by one of the lodging’s footmen, demanded of Alec that he give her immediate access to the Arch apartment or she would have the local militia storm the rooms. Why she needed access was not stated; that she demanded access Alec found of great interest. His refusal of her demands, coupled with the continued presence of the bearlike footman at the entrance to the apartment, must have sent her ladyship on her way because he heard nothing further about her until Jeffries appeared in the servant doorway.

Jeffries repositioned a spindle-legged writing desk and matching ladder-back chair closer the windowseat and into the path of the fading afternoon light. He then produced paper, quill and ink, and a pair of Alec’s gold-rimmed eyeglasses, which he arranged with exacting straight-line precision on the small escritoire. He lit a candelabra, set this on the desktop and with a bow to Alec, who watched all this with polite interest but said nothing, he left the sitting room to return not many minutes later with two kitchen boys at his heels, one carrying a tray laden with silver domed dishes and the other with a silver coffee pot and service.

“Dinner, my lord,” Jeffries intoned, not a facial muscle movement in recognition of the wails and moans of childbirth in the adjoining room.

Alec was silently impressed and a little unnerved. The fellow could very well have been in a stately dining room such was his haughty demeanor.

“I took the liberty of bringing you your writing implements, my lord,” Jeffries added needlessly when Alec glanced over at the arrangement of desk and chair. He handed Alec two sealed letters. “So that you can reply to these at your leisure. I thought, perhaps, you might have the time...”

Ah, so Jeffries had some idea of what was going on in the next room; he wasn’t completely devoid of sentiment!

Alec recognized the handwriting and seal on one of the letters; it was from his godmother, the Dowager Duchess of Romney-St. Neots. The other was from Lady Rutherglen. His godmother’s letter could wait and he slipped this in a frockcoat pocket and broke the seal on the second and held it out until the script came into focus. Blotches of ink dotted the sentences, as if the note had been written in great haste, or great agitation. Alec was inclined to the latter explanation because of her ladyship’s emotive prose; phrases such as
make a mockery of justice
,
cunning trickery
,
outrageous abuse of trust
leapt out of the page along with the predictable demand that Alec give her access to the apartment, and that he had no right to deny her entry to see
the creature for herself.

An interesting choice of moniker,
creature
, for a young woman whom his uncle was convinced beyond doubt, and would defend to the hilt, was all sweetness and light, Alec pondered as he ate tidily of the slices of lamb set before him. Lady Rutherglen’s ink dripped from an ill-tempered spleen, but there was an undercurrent of something else... fear? Yes, that was it. She
feared
the woman in the next room who, at that moment, let out such a wail that Jeffries gave a little jump on the spot.

Alec wondered if the nervous anticipation he felt at the impending birth was what men about to become fathers experienced when their wives were in labor, and he wondered if he would ever have that opportunity with Selina; if they were ever destined to marry and have a family. He had not thought too deeply about that aspect of their marriage: children. He was so set on getting the woman he loved to the altar and made his wife that all other considerations were secondary. Now, rather curiously, as an unwilling eavesdropper on a woman suffering the pain of labor to deliver up a new little life, he realized that he did want children of his own; very much.

He wished Tam would emerge from the bedchamber if only to satisfy himself the boy was indeed bearing up under the demands of being responsible for the lives of a mother and her unborn. Too much responsibility for one so young, in Alec’s opinion, regardless of the experience Tam had gathered as an apothecary’s apprentice. He was still that, an apprentice, and yet to attain the dizzying heights of being admitted to the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries. Whatever his uncle’s staunch belief in the boy’s ability to handle himself in dangerous and emotionally draining affairs, particularly deadly affairs which childbirth most definitely was, Alec had no wish to see Tam’s career over before it had started should the birth not produce a happy outcome.

“Sir? My lord?”

It was Tam. He closed over the bedchamber door but did not shut it, and wiped his flushed face and then his hands with a damp towel which he then tossed aside. He was disheveled, red damp curls stuck to his scalp, crumpled white shirt pushed up over his elbows and wet with perspiration. He licked his dry lips and sighed, looking about the room, as if for something in particular. His eyes widened at the tray on the sideboard holding a jug and tankard, and it was Alec, up off the sofa, and not Jeffries, who stepped forward and poured him out an ale and handed it to him. But before either could speak, the valet said, in answer to Alec’s earlier comment,

“If you have finished, my lord, shall I clear away the dinner things? And I do assure your lordship that I prefer to remain should you need my assistance in the event anything untoward occurs. I am of more use to your lordship here than elsewhere.”

The stress on the word
untoward
did not go unnoticed by Alec or Tam but as Tam was the only one facing the valet he was the one to see Jeffries’ eyebrows raise and his mouth pull down to add further emphasis to the insinuation Tam was not wholly competent in the situation he now found himself in. But Tam was too tired and too involved in the event unfolding in the next room to be bothered with a petty squabble with, when all was said and done, a footman elevated temporarily above his station. Still, he could not let Jeffries get away with such boldness so he threw Hadrian mightier-than-though Jeffries a look of complete disdain, a look Alec caught and also chose to ignore, saying over his shoulder to Jeffries,

“Be good enough to clear away my plate, pour me out a coffee and take yourself off for half an hour or so while I speak with Mr. Fisher in private. Kick your heels with Mr. Halsey. I would like to know how he is faring and if he has anything to report from the other side of that door. Now, Tam,” he said, taking from Jeffries a coffee cup on its saucer, “Mrs. Bourdon’s maid has left you a cold collation. I assume that’s who she is, though she seemed to go out of her way to avoid looking at me; as if I had two heads and would frighten her. Are you all right? Is there anything I can do for you?”

Tam shook his head. “No, sir. That is, I am all right. There is nothing anyone can do. Nature will take its course and so we wait. By my reckoning it won’t be long now.”

Alec noted with concern the tiredness in the boy’s eyes and the grim line to his mouth.

“I am sorry the physician hasn’t come sooner to relieve you.”

“As to that, sir, I—”

He stopped abruptly, realizing Jeffries was still in the room, so drank down his ale, suddenly very thirsty indeed, an eye on his replacement who, in his opinion, lingered far too long over stacking the remnants of his master’s dinner onto a tray, before fussing unnecessarily with the coffee pot on its little stand, picking it up and setting it down as if it was necessary to do so to see if the candle in the warmer remained alight.

As Jeffries finally closed over the door, Tam lifted the domed silver cover off the plate, a glance at Alec who waved at him to eat, and peered at the arrangement of slices of cold roast beef, carrots and potato, a fist of bread and the wedge of cheese and his empty stomach growled in response yet, inexplicably, he did not feel the need to eat. Still, he knew he had to fortify himself for a labor that could go on all night. He forked a slice of roast beef.

“Mrs. Bourdon will not have a physician, sir. She made me promise. But I made her agree that if things got bad, if complications arose, if her life or the babe’s were in any danger, then I would fetch a physician in to help her. I can’t break my promise.”

“Of course not, but she’s placed a tremendous burden on you.”

“She’s scared out of her wits, sir. And rightly so. She witnessed her cousin die in childbirth in the most horrific of circumstances; we both did. The physician hacked the baby from her belly; it saved the child but killed the mother. The thing of it is, sir, the girl wasn’t dead, near death but not dead, when he butchered her.”

Alec blanched. “Good God. How horrifying... But... Surely Mrs. Bourdon should be reassured that won’t happen to her given this is her second lying-in?”

Tam swallowed hard, wanting badly to confess all to his master yet hesitating to do so because it would be a breach of trust. But he needed to confide in his lordship; he could think of no one else who would be more understanding to his plight, and to hers, except perhaps Mr. Halsey. And what if something did go wrong with the birth? It had been her cousin Miriam’s first child and it had killed her; it could happen to Miranda Bourdon. But he would not let anyone do to her what had been done to her cousin, under any circumstances. He needed Alec to realize that, to support her decision and his.

One look into Alec’s blue eyes full of worried concern and the accompanying understanding smile and everything came tumbling forth: Cousin Miriam’s difficult labor—all forty exhausting hours, with Dobbs unable to turn the baby from the breech position; that she was only fifteen years old or thereabouts, as was Miranda; the girls so alike in countenance that it was uncanny. They were runaways and Mr. Blackwell had given them sanctuary; the heartbreaking decision the old vicar had been forced to make to choose between dying mother and child; that a physician had cut open the dying girl in the hopes of saving the baby; that he had never witnessed anything so horrifying in his life and never hoped to again; how he had wondered and worried what had happened to Miranda and the baby and to save his sanity Mr. Dobbs had told him he must put the whole episode out of his mind as if it had never happened. And then Mrs. Bourdon had been thrust back into his life, and revealed to him that her cousin Miriam was the Reverend Blackwell’s natural daughter.

“...So you see, sir, it’s no wonder Mrs. Bourdon is scared out of her wits, this being her first babe.”

Alec did not answer immediately. He could not. He was still trying to absorb everything Tam had told him. It was as if he had just woken from a nightmare and in a mental fog was recalling details of the bad dream without really wanting to. He picked up his coffee cup, drinking down the last of the coffee without realizing it was cold and nodded distractedly, a glance over Tam’s shoulder at the bedchamber door.

“The poor woman has every reason to be terrified... Her cousin, she confided, was Blackwell’s
natural
daughter? And Mrs. Bourdin and her cousin... Miriam? Mrs. Bourdon and Miriam were so similar in appearance they could be mistaken one for the other?”

“Yes, sir. Mrs. Bourdon said that when they were growing up, sometimes Miriam would pretend to be her, just to make mischief.” He smiled crookedly. “Sounds as if Miriam was a right wild thing.”

“An understatement. The girl was pregnant at fourteen.”

“Mr. Fisher! Mr.
Fisher
!”

It was Janie, calling from the bedchamber. She appeared at the door in a rush, hands bunched in her petticoats, but seeing Alec, she dropped into a curtsey and lowered her eyes to the floorboards. “Beggin’ your lordship’s pardon.” She glanced up at Tam. “I think the babe’s almost here. She’s askin’ for ye. You’d best come quickly.” And disappeared back into the room on Tam’s nod.

“Sir,” said Tam, immediately on his feet but staying his ground. “Mrs. Bourdin made one last request concerning the babe. She wants me to say it’s a girl, whatever its sex.”

“How curious… But if it makes her comfortable and less fearful, there can be no harm in it. She could very well give birth to a daughter. Now go. Mr. Halsey and I, and indeed Mrs. Bourdon, we have every faith in your abilities.” He smiled. “I know you’ll do splendidly.”

Tam returned Alec’s smile, feeling more confident about the task ahead of him, made a quaint little bow and was gone into the bedchamber just as Hadrian Jeffries re-entered the sitting room.