Deadly Affair: A Georgian Historical Mystery (Alec Halsey Crimance) (47 page)

“My lord, please put away the sword,” Selina asked quietly, a terrified glance at Alec who trod slowly across the room. “Lady Rutherglen doesn’t deserve—”

“You’ve no idea what Auntie deserves!” Lord George spat out. He stared down at his aunt. “Retract! Retract what you said, Auntie, or I swear to God, I’ll stick you!”

Lady Rutherglen did not flinch.

“I cannot retract the truth, George,” Lady Rutherglen replied in a patronizing tone one uses on a small child. “Miriam was a thief and a liar and a slut. She stole your mother’s jewelry and ran away. Mrs. Jamison-Lewis has one of the earrings. See. And you recovered the other pieces yourself from that thieving farm boy. Isn’t that proof enough of her deceit?”

“Dear God, Stanton,
you
killed Billy Rumble?” Selina demanded, “For what? A few
trinkets
? He was just a boy!”

“They’re the Cleveley diamonds,” Lady Rutherglen stated, affronted. “They’re worth a king’s ransom and that
boy
stole them from Miriam, who had stolen them from my sister. Thus, he was in possession of stolen goods. He deserved what he got.”

“He was promised a few guineas to do the deed. How is it then that he is deserving of being cut down and left to die all alone?” Selina argued. “Your nephew murdered that poor boy in cold blood!”

“Murdered?” Lord George exclaimed, a blink at his aunt before addressing Alec, the one person in the room that had not accused him of murder. The sword point remained at his aunt’s neck. “I didn’t murder anyone! God! Why would I kill a wastrel farm boy? Why go to the effort? Halsey! You believe me, don’t you?”

“Come, George, tell the truth,” Lady Rutherglen purred coaxingly. “Charles told me everything and I don’t blame you one penny for cutting down a filthy fleshmonger. The cripple tried to sell you a child, so he deserved what he got.” She looked at Alec. “I challenge anyone to find a magistrate who’ll say differently.”

“He didn’t deserve to die! No child deserves to die!”

Lady Rutherglen smiled thinly at Selina’s emotive outburst. Mindful of her nephew’s sword point she looked straight at her and said, “My dear, you are the last person who has a right to cast stones. The cripple was put out his misery for surely he would have been strung up for his crime and be remembered forever more by family and his parish as a thief and a kidnapper. In the eyes of society George merely did the law’s job. You, however, have no reason for your despicable actions towards your unborn children, and the law certainly would not side with you!”

“I didn’t kill anyone!” Lord George whined in the heavy silence.

Selina swayed and gripped the back of the wingchair. She dared not look at Alec. “It was a miscarriage... I lost the baby...”

“Then accept my apology. Though there were other times, were there not? Lady Cobham informed me, in the strictest confidence of course, that during your marriage your actions were deliberate and for the loss of those unborn children you have no excuse.”

“Egad but you’re a cold hearted serpent!” Plantagenet Halsey uttered, eyes riveted to Lady Rutherglen. He took Selina by the elbow and helped her to a wingchair. He, too, dared not look at Alec as his nephew came across the room to stand beside Lord George Stanton, not a glance at Selina.

“Come, sir!” Lady Rutherglen argued. “You know as well as I that Mrs. Jamison-Lewis’s actions are a hanging offence. Thus she, of all the persons in this room, cannot point a finger at my nephew.” She looked at Alec. “I suggest we forget all about the death of one insignificant farm boy, and I shall conveniently disremember what Lady Cobham told me. What say you, my lord?”

There was a long silence in the room, so long that Selina dared to glance at Alec and wished she had not. He had been regarding her with a knot of pain between his brows and when she looked up into his blue eyes he quickly glanced away and addressed Lord George Stanton, a whisper of the emotional turmoil he was feeling in the tone of his voice.

“Stanton. Be a good fellow and put away your sword... It has been a long night and I think we can all agree that this episode is best ended here.”

“I didn’t kill anyone!” Lord George whined again, and sheathed his sword as requested. “You believe me, Halsey, don’t you?”

“That is not important, George,” Lady Rutherglen said with satisfaction, shaking out her velvet and quilted cotton under petticoats. “What is important is taking Auntie upstairs to confront that whore once and for all time.”

Lord George stared at Lady Rutherglen and took a step away from her. “So you think me a murderer of children, Auntie? You think I could kill a cripple? Zounds, but the old man is right! You are a cold-hearted serpent!” He went for his sword again but before his hand as much as touched the jeweled hilt Alec said calmly,

“I do believe you, my lord. And I have every confidence that the truth of what happened to Billy Rumble will come out during Charles’s interrogation.” He glanced at Lady Rutherglen. “And just how the Cleveley jewelry happened to come into the possession of your aunt.”

George glared at his aunt. “I told you! I told you it was Charlie!”

“What I want to know is who thwacked me over the head and set thugs, dressed in the Cleveley livery, on poor Yarrborough?” Plantagenet Halsey demanded loudly, a significant glare at Lord George.

“And made sure to leave silver buttons as calling-cards?” added Alec, a smile at Lord George’s response, which was to let his mouth drop open with incredulity that accusations continued to be cast in his direction. “I am confidant further questioning of Charles will quickly reveal he used Cleveley livery and buttons to reinforce the notion it was the Duke or Lord George who wanted to get their hands on Blackwell’s will—”

“What would I want with a vicar’s—”

“—but in truth, it was Charles who wanted Blackwell’s will—” began Alec, cutting off Lord George’s bewildered outburst, only to be cut off himself.

“—because with Blackwell’s will destroyed nobody would know the truth contained within it and Stanton here could succeed to the dukedom, no one else the wiser?” Plantagenet Halsey stated and smiled with satisfaction at Alec’s nod. “The cunning fox!”

“Look here, old man!” Lord George demanded. “I don’t know what you’re on about but no one has ever asked me what I want!
Ever
. And what I want is to go to m’bed and sleep for a week! Tonight’s mish-mash has given me a damned headache.”

There was a general grumble of assent and movement of leave-taking in the drawing room, but Lord George Stanton, for all his bravado, did not move. He beckoned Alec over.

“Halsey. You’re a Trusty Trojan. Always said so,” he said in a low voice. “Tell me the truth. Is it Miriam or Miranda upstairs? I must know.
I must
.”

“It is your cousin Miranda, and that is the truth.”

“Come now, my lord!” Lady Rutherglen scoffed, taking her nephew’s arm. “You cannot produce compelling evidence to make me believe that the woman upstairs is my dead daughter Miranda. Mimi died five years ago of pneumonia after being led astray by her wicked cousin. It is Miriam upstairs. I have seen the portrait. I saw her in the Abbey. That was a shock I admit, but nonetheless, I would know my own daughter. You do not know her, nor have you ever seen her. George and I both know it is Miriam upstairs. The whore has hoodwinked you right royally.”

Lord George shrugged her off.

“If Miriam was a whore it was because I made her one! Just as I did Hatty. But Miriam and me... I-I... Just shut
your
mouth, Auntie!”

“She’s certainly not my whore,” Talgarth Vesey offered, as he languidly stretched himself out of the wingchair. “Mrs. Bourdon is as white as the day I met her.”

“Mrs. Bourdon indeed! She can’t wallpaper over her past! Whatever she calls herself, she is still Miriam,
not
Miranda.”

Lord George ignored her and stared at Alec.

“I must know, Halsey,” he pleaded, a pathetic catch to his voice. “She ran away from me. I didn’t know why. I think I do now. It was because I got her with child, isn’t it? Aye, Halsey, that’s the truth of it! But she didn’t tell me. I didn’t know! No one told me! Constant inebriation keeps her from my thoughts, but if I could just know the truth... I beg of you...”

Alec regarded the obese unkempt and thoroughly repugnant nobleman and wondered if there was any hope of rehabilitation for such an ugly specimen of humankind, one who was pathetically immature in thought and deed and, if Alec had his way, would be sent out to earn a living at some meaningful trade to know the value of honest work. But he begrudgingly had to admit that for all his social ineptitude and worthless preoccupations, Lord George was as much a victim of his milieu as anything else. His mother, his adoptive father and most certainly Lady Rutherglen had all pandered and catered to his lordship’s every whim. What stood before him was a blood-shot inebriated whining idler, but for all that, innocent of any crime save falling in love with his sister unknowingly. Perhaps Lord George Stanton’s life could be made to mean something; at the very least be steered away from the insidious influence of his aunt and people such as the self-serving Sir Charles Weir. The Duke had started him on some sort of path to rehabilitation by arranging an engagement to Lord Russell’s daughter. Perhaps if he could be kept on such a path there was hope for him yet. He knew just the person to aid in this endeavor.

“George! Dearest George, how I’ve missed you! Come in! Come in and meet your baby brother.”

Lord George Stanton continued to hover on the threshold of the bedchamber, all agog. Bear Brown shifted from foot to foot, holding the door wide. It was the Duke who stepped forward and beckoned his stepson into the room where Miranda sat propped up in the four-poster bed cradling her newborn son.

Alec nodded to the mountain-sized servant as he stepped back into the sitting room of the Arch apartment, smiling as the door closed over on the family reunion. He was not smiling when ten minutes later he encountered Selina on the arm of his uncle coming up the main stairs.

“My lord! Alec! I—we need to talk—I want to explain—”

“No! No,” he said softly, yet there was no disguising the aloofness in his tone. “Not yet.” From his frockcoat pocket he took out his godmother’s letter. “Tomorrow. Perhaps. I need some time—alone. Goodnight, Mrs. Jamison-Lewis. Uncle.”

Selina and the old man watched Alec ascend the stairs and disappear along the passageway to his suite of rooms.

Alone in the peace and quiet and sitting before a new fire, a silk banyan thrown over his nightshirt, Alec broke the seal and spread out the single sheet of parchment from his godmother and read.

Dearest Alec

You must come to London at once. I cannot stress enough the urgency of my need for you. Civil war has once again broken out in Midanich. The Margrave holds firm in the north, while his brother Prince Vicktor has, with the help of French troops, taken control of the south. No family has been spared bloodshed. There are reports of thousands dead and of thousands fleeing to the border. But all borders are closed. No one gets in or out of the principality.

Why am I writing about a minor European principality to you? I can see your frown! What does this old woman care how many Midnachians are killed in their beds? Now you are laughing at me! In truth, I am so distraught I am shaking all over and my hand can barely form the words on the page to tell you. Emily’s life is in peril. She is in Midanich. She and Cosmo are prisoners of this Viktor. There is a demand for money and jewels... A lock of my darling girl’s hair was sent me as proof. If we do not act on their demands I am told her finger will next be severed to prove their intent.

Dearest boy, come to London at once. I need you...