Deadly Affair: A Georgian Historical Mystery (Alec Halsey Crimance) (5 page)

Although he nodded his agreement, Alec’s reassurances didn’t make Tam feel any better. “I still don’t understand why anyone would want to poison Mr. Blackwell.”

“Nor do I. Yet, if Blackwell’s death wasn’t from natural causes, I mean to make it my business to find out why someone would want dead a seemingly good and harmless man of God.” And to Alec’s reckoning, if he hoped to learn more about the Reverend Blackwell he would have to know more about the Duke of Cleveley. But how to get close to a man whose very nature precluded closeness?

“Sir,” said Tam, a glance at the mantle clock, “I’d best see to your clothes if you still intend visiting that picture exhibition...?”

“Ah, yes,” Alec sighed. “Must needs support new talent. Oh, Tam, before you scurry off... What would you say to taking a holiday at Bath after your examinations?”

“To keep an eye on Mr. Halsey, sir?”

“Let’s just say, to keep him company.”

“What shall you do, sir?”

“Without you?” Alec tried not to smile at the boy’s look of deep concern. “I’ll manage. I have thus far. Oh, don’t look worried. It’s more important you pass your examinations. Valets are easy to come-by, not so good apothecaries.”

Tam wasn’t reassured. In fact he wondered if this was the first step in easing him out of his position. After all, he’d hardly done a full day’s work as a valet in months. He tried not to look hurt. “Mr. Halsey might not want my company, sir.”

“It’s you or a strong-armed nurse. In all seriousness, he’ll be only too grateful to have you, and I won’t leave the two of you alone for long. I’ll join you at the end of a fortnight.”

With a sluggish step and a heavy heart, Tam went away to prepare his master’s change of clothes. He passed Wantage in the passageway and such was the look of smug triumph on the butler’s long face that Tam was sure it was no mere coincidence he felt his position as a gentleman’s gentleman was under threat. He was sure of it when Wantage winked at him and continued on his way with a decided spring in his step.

“I do not see what’s so interesting about a recipe for Mrs. Rumble’s Strawberry Relish,” Selina Jamison-Lewis commented, not bothering to look up from the heavy oak library table where she sat surrounded by a toppling mountain of ledgers and correspondence. She re-dipped her quill in ink. “Although... It is a particularly good relish. Shall I copy it out for you?”

“Don’t be silly, Lina!” retorted her sister-in-law, Lady Cobham, smoothing a crease in her satin sleeve to hide her embarrassment at being caught out reading a letter Selina had been careless enough to let fall off the table onto the Turkey rug. She shut her fan, tossed it and Selina’s letter onto a little walnut stand, and selected another sweetmeat from the silver bowl at her elbow. Her teeth worried her constantly. “M. Maria? Mary? Margaret? Miriam? Maude?”

“Miranda.”

Lady Cobham’s thinly plucked eyebrows shot up. “Oh? The little orphan with the bastard daughter… Sophie, isn’t it?”

“I detest your memory, Caro.”

Lady Cobham smiled and chose another sweetmeat. “She forms beautiful letters, if that’s any reflection on her character. It’s almost time for your yearly pilgrimage to that squalid little farm where you’ve given her sanctuary, isn’t it?”

Selina put the quill in the ornate silver Standish and proceeded to wash the page of neatly tallied figures with sand to set the wet ink. “I don’t care to discuss Miranda.”

“Discuss her? You’ve not told me more than two sentences about her!” complained Lady Cobham. “You’ve put a roof over the girl’s head; visit her every year; take
her
child gifts.
And,
now I learn you correspond. I sense intrigue and mystery. The very fact you refuse to discuss her with me, your dearest and only sister-in-law, is proof enough of that.”

Selina bit her lip. Why couldn’t she be left to her monthly bills in peace? But she didn’t have the cold heartedness to turn her sister-in law out; the woman was married to her priggish brother after all and that in itself engendered Selina’s sympathy.

“You have no reason to be jealous of my friendship with an ill-used girl who lives a blameless life in the wilds of Somerset,” she said as she sorted through the smaller pile of bills and extracted the one she was looking for. She absently tidied the others back into formation. When Lady Cobham remained silent she looked up and saw the pout. “The child came to my door when she had nowhere else to turn,” she added patiently. “She and her infant had been abandoned by her lover. She had just turned fifteen. What would you have done?”

Lady Cobham shrugged as she tried to dislodge a chewed sweetmeat from an aching tooth. “Directed her to the nearest workhouse. Helping the poor to help themselves is one thing, Lina, but aiding and abetting a girl who is foolish enough to get herself and her bastard abandoned, well! That’s just asking to be taken advantage. The lower orders need to be put in their place, their actions not condoned.”

“Thank you for your advice, Caro,” Selina answered quietly, her only sign of anger the flash of her large dark eyes. “I must remember that for the next meeting of the Belsay Orphanage Board of Governors.”

Lady Cobham shifted uneasily amongst the tapestry cushions on the chaise longue. “Oh dear, I’ve offended you.” She took the last sweetmeat from the silver dish. “The trouble with you, my dear, is that you haven’t hardened your heart to the many miseries that surround us. You think you can make a difference with this absurd orphanage of yours. But you can’t. No one can. Misery will always be there.”

Selina cast her eye over an exorbitant bill for Parisian embroidered silks and delicate lacework. Four more months and then she could discard her dreary mourning for color and fashionable whims. She was counting the days. “Now
that
is my brother talking,” she replied absently.

Lady Cobham eyed her beautiful sister-in-law speculatively. Such delicate features framed by an over-abundance of flaming apricot curls gave Selina the appearance of an ethereal being, deserved of being put atop a pedestal, or at the very least surrounded by a diffuse golden halo worn by the angels woven into mediaeval tapestries. But appearances could be deceptive, and none more so than with Selina. And there was a saying, something about still waters running deep. Lady Cobham thought this very apt for her sister-in-law. She could well believe the rumor that Selina was having a passionate affair with the notorious and handsomely dark Lord Halsey. Still, it would be gratifying to have the whispers confirmed…

“I hadn’t finished telling you about Sir Charles Weir’s dinner party,” said Lady Cobham lightly, hoping to draw Selina out.

“I’ve heard all I want to know about the death of that poor cleric.”

“If you recall, I was just about to tell you who was seated next to the scruffy cleric when we were interrupted with the tea things.”

“Is that important?”

“Oh, I think you’ll be vastly interested, my dear, for the man happens to have the suspicion of murder on his own head. Cobham says that must make him the prime suspect in the cleric’s death. Though why he would want to murder such a nobody is anyone’s guess.”

Selina sighed. She really did not have time for Caroline’s scandal mongering. Her man of business was arriving at any moment for the purpose of discussing suitable tenants for this monolith of a house in Hanover Square. She couldn’t continue to live under this roof. It had been her husband’s home and contained too many painful memories of an arranged marriage that had been a disaster from day one.

“A murderer at Sir Charles’s dinner party?” she heard herself say as she sorted through a pile of correspondence. “A pity Cobham was out of town. He’d have enjoyed pointing the finger.”

Lady Cobham looked about the vast room with its furniture still under covers, strategically avoiding Selina’s dark eyes for fear she would give herself away. “I should think most of London is pointing the finger at him, Lina. Cobham says there was talk of reinstating him at White’s since His Majesty saw fit to bestow a Marquessate upon him but not after this latest little drama he’s become embroiled in. And as he was seated next to the cleric, that can only make matters worse for Halsey—”

“
Halsey?
” Suddenly, Lady Cobham had Selina’s undivided attention. “Why was Al—Lord Halsey at one of Sir Charles Weir’s party political dinners?”

“He and Sir Charles were at Harrow together,” Lady Cobham replied blandly, though her pulse was up under her sister-in-law’s hard stare. “As I said, Halsey was seated next to the cleric throughout dinner and was again beside him when the men sat over their port, and that’s when the cleric up and died.”

Selina left the desk to stand by the undraped sash windows with their view of the expansive Square, hoping to hide the heat in her throat. “How dreadful,” she murmured. “What did the attending physician say caused the vicar’s death?”

“
Officially
he died of a heart attack. Of course no one
believes
that. How can we when the cleric dropped dead at the feet of a man accused of murdering his own brother to get an earldom for himself?”

“That’s a lie!” Selina exclaimed, rounding angrily on her sister-in-law. “I won’t have you repeating such malicious gossip, Caro!”

Lady Cobham sat up and slowly drew on her lavender kid gloves. “I don’t begrudge you your Parisian dalliance with Halsey,” she said silkily, a sly glance at her red-faced sister-in-law. “No sane woman could be immune to such potent masculinity. It matters not a wit if he did kill a penniless vicar, or his own brother, for that matter. What Cobham and I find particularly abhorrent is the persistent rumor he’s the base-born product of his mother’s affair with her mulatto footman. Marquessate aside, one shudders at the likely shade of the offspring from marriage to a man with such muddied blood. But what particularly offends Cobham is not so much the man’s black heritage, that could be swept aside had he been a prince of the subcontinent, but that the Countess of Delvin chose to lower herself to couple with her footman;
a menial
. You, Lina, are a Vesey, descended from an unbroken line since the Plantagenets with no one in the family tree related to anyone below the rank of Viscount. There is most definitely no servant blood of any rank. Our interests must and will be guarded. Do I make myself understood?”

Selina remained stubbornly mute, face averted, a long hand to her burning throat. Lady Cobham glanced at the ornate clock on the mantle and made motions to leave, yet waited for her sister-in-law’s assent. Finally, Selina nodded, hating herself for being weak-willed enough to appear to acquiesce to family pressure. But she wasn’t about to reveal to her sister-in-law the very personal and heartbreaking reason why she could never marry Alec, not when she had yet to tell the man himself.

“Cobham has no need to fear for the Vesey name,” she stated dully. “Alec and I… Matters between us... I have no intention of marrying Lord Halsey.”

“Your brother will be pleased,” Lady Cobham replied sweetly and kissed Selina’s flushed cheek. “I’ll be at the exhibition. Cobham won’t lower himself to attend. But one must support family. I might not approve of Talgarth but he is your brother and a Vesey, so one must do one’s duty. I know
you
say Talgarth is very talented but...” She shrugged realizing Selina was not listening. “Adieu, my dear.”

Selina watched Lady Cobham maneuver her hooped petticoats along the passageway and down the stairs to the waiting sedan chair then turned back into the library. Damn Caro’s love of gossip! How was she to front up with carefree enthusiasm to an exhibition of her younger brother’s pictures (his first, too), when all she could think about was the effect of the unfortunate cleric’s death on the love of her life? She resolved to write to him at once. They may have parted acrimoniously but that did not stop her giving him her total support. She wondered how he would receive such a letter.

She worried herself needlessly.

In the exhibition rooms they came face to face.

He was not pleased to see her.

The show rooms in Oxford Street were crowded, the air hot and heavy with perfume. And it was noisy; too much harsh laughter competing with the chinking of wine glasses. Tables strained under the weight of prepared food, punch in silver urns, and elaborate arrangements of fruit and flowers in season. Given the animated conversations and the high spirits, the uninvited would hardly have guessed that they had stumbled across a select preview to honor fresh new talent to the art world.