Last Nocturne (34 page)

Needing no more inducement, the cabbie careered across London, cracking his whip and terrifying pedestrians, small dogs and motorised traffic, ignoring fist-waving policemen. Edwina was thrown about inside the hansom like a pea in a baby’s rattle, but managed to adjust her hat and emerge at the hotel entrance seventeen minutes later, now heavily veiled, clutching a small leather attaché case. It wanted ten minutes to the designated time by the clock tower on the magnificently ornate hotel serving the railway station.

It was true she had never been to St Pancras before, either to the station, or its hotel, but she approached it with her usual confidence and was immediately disconcerted, on stepping inside the entrance hall, to find herself taken aback, not a little overawed by the Gothic splendours and lavishness of decoration. She vaguely remembered reading the boast, at its opening, that it was the greatest railway hotel in the world. She was overtaken by a feeling, not familiar to her, of being put in her place, dwarfed by its height, its cathedral-like vaulting and marble pillars. Refusing to be intimidated by mere architecture, however, much less by the august personage who occupied the desk in the vast entrance hall, she briskly enquired as to the whereabouts of the Ladies’ Smoking Room, where she might wait. She was dressed in the sombre black which constituted what she had called her widows’ weeds and which, through some oversight, had not been given to charity after being thankfully relinquished. Being exceedingly fashionable weeds, instead of giving her the anonymity she had hoped for, they simply served, together with the heavy veil, to underline the fact that here was a lady of some means, and one who wished not to be recognised. She saw this from the respectful but speculative way she was addressed. Well, it couldn’t be helped now. Pulling her veil closer, she followed the directions, and walked along curving corridors to the grand and immensely ornate, crimson-papered main staircase which swept upwards and threw wide arms to right and left. Hurrying up, she was brought to a momentary halt on the first floor landing by the amazing sight, through a huge window, of the glassed-in railway station itself spread below, bursting with travellers and with hissing and smoking monsters waiting to carry them to the north, to destinations such as Sheffield and Leeds, places Edwina had scarcely heard of and had no desire to visit.

The waiting room was high and huge, not at present over-populated, and very quiet, each woman there apparently absorbed in her own concerns, reading or taking the chance of a nap while waiting for her train. She chose a secluded corner away from the high windows leading to the great balcony outside, around which most of the other ladies were sitting, none of whom, she was glad to see, were engaged in the occupation for which the room had originally been daringly designated. She rang for tea to be sent but when it came, found she was too nervous to want to drink – or even to eat the buttered teacake which came with it. Had there not been so many ladies who must have noticed her entrance, despite being apparently absorbed in their own concerns, she would have left the small attaché case by her chair and departed immediately, but she had no doubt someone would notice her abrupt departure and remind her that she’d left the case. As it was, the others soon left off noticing her, she settled down and made a pretence of pouring her tea, and found she was thirsty. The teacake was, after all, delicious. And perhaps…just one of those tempting little pastries?

Taking the chance to look covertly around the room after a while, she could see no one who might be Eugenia Dart, except perhaps that woman with
The Times
held up in front of her face, her chair angled to the window. But she was so much better dressed than ever Eugenia had been in Edwina’s experience – even the enveloping dark grey coat the woman was wearing was well cut – that she dismissed the possibility of it being her.

Her tea finished, she felt she could leave now without exciting comment. The case had been discreetly stowed between her chair and the wall and no one apparently noticed when she left without it.

She walked rapidly away and stationed herself in a corridor just around the corner, positioning herself so that she could observe who came and went from the waiting room. Several chambermaids, a waiter or two and a porter hurried past, burdened with suitcases, trays of food, fresh laundry and cans of hot water, giving her curious looks, but no one spoke to her or questioned her. She grew restive (Edwina was not used to waiting, either on her own account or anyone else’s) but her patience was rewarded when, after about ten minutes, the woman she’d had her eye on emerged nervously from the door she was watching, clutching the case.

Edwina laid a heavy hand on the woman’s shoulder. A terrified face was turned towards her. She cried, ‘You!’

A moment later, she had wrested the case back into her own possession. ‘So,’ she said, ‘may I now have my letters back?’

‘I d-don’t have them here. They’re at home,’ said Cynthia Cadell.

‘Then I will go home with you and retrieve my property.’

Cynthia stammered, ‘I said I would return them, and I would have done so.’

‘Will, don’t you mean?’

‘Yes, of course. I’ll return them immediately, Edwina.’

‘No, you’ll deliver them into my own hands. When I go home with you, as I said.’ Edwina sounded firm, but in truth she was almost as shaken as Cynthia, who looked as though she were about to faint. ‘But first, we need to talk,’ she said. ‘Not back there in the waiting room. It’s so quiet everyone will be all ears. But I noticed a coffee room downstairs.’

‘Well, Cynthia?’ Edwina demanded when they were seated in the coffee room. ‘The whole story, if you please.’

Cynthia had regained a little colour and along with it a touch of bravado. ‘Very well, it was at Fanny Cornleigh’s. You were so protective of that bag you were carrying around it was obvious there was something important in it and when you left it on a sofa – yes, my dear, you did, you know how often you’ve admitted how frightfully forgetful you are! – I couldn’t resist taking a peep inside, and that pretty little pochette looked so interesting I just opened it and there were the letters. I swear I didn’t read them, I just borrowed them, intending to give you a fright.’

‘And not having read them, what were you intending to do?’

Cynthia’s green eyes flickered. She answered obliquely, ‘I couldn’t understand why you didn’t miss them immediately.’

‘You forget – I’ve had a great deal on my mind lately,’ Edwina reminded her, somewhat bitterly.

‘I know.’ Cynthia stretched out a sympathetic hand to lay on her friend’s knee, then thought better of it. ‘The last time I saw you – the afternoon I took tea with you, I could see you weren’t yourself. I thought you might have found out about the letters and decided…well, you looked so – oh, I don’t know – but I thought perhaps I ought to return them. I really meant to, but I just took a little look first, you know, and then… Oh, Edwina, you’ve always been blessed with this world’s goods. You don’t realise how difficult life can be with a daughter to marry and a tight-fisted husband!’ She looked up helplessly, hopes for her Virginia and Guy Martagon fading before her eyes.

‘Perhaps, my dear Cynthia, if you didn’t spend quite so much money at Lucile’s establishment, and a little less at the card table…’ retorted Edwina, eyeing the sophisticated ensemble in shades of violet, exactly matching the amethysts in Cynthia’s ears, revealed beneath the long coat Mrs Cadell had thrown open in the warm room.

‘I simply must have a hundred and fifty pounds by next week!’

Edwina saw her eyes drawn to the attaché case like a magnet and laughed. ‘Oh, Cynthia, you don’t believe I would have brought the money with me? There’s nothing in the case but old newspaper. You’ve done little to show me I can trust you, after all.’

‘You don’t understand. I just don’t know where to turn!’ Cynthia began to sob into an inadequate little lace handkerchief. ‘I’m not clever, like you—’

‘No, or you would never have concocted such a hare-brained scheme. You’ve been very foolish and now you’ll have to put up with the consequences, Cynthia dear.’

‘You mean—’ The little cat face emerging from the folds of the handkerchief was ashen beneath its discreet rouging. ‘You’re going to tell the police?’

‘No. I am going to forgive you,’ said Edwina magnificently. ‘And that will be worse, I hope. For then you can’t go around telling people what you know – or think you know – from those letters, can you?’

Her eyes fixed poor Cynthia like a pin through a butterfly.

Afterwards, she sat in her boudoir with the curtains drawn and the lamps lit, with the letters she had extracted from the little silk bag on her knee, her hands resting on them with uncharacteristic quietness.

She had made herself re-read them with particular care, not skimming them and shutting disagreeable words and phrases from her mind afterwards as she had done previously. It was all there – Eliot’s love affair with this woman. Full of oblique references to things she couldn’t understand, and others she understood only too well. Frequent mention of a child, Sophie.
Eliot’s child
. His child, and this woman’s who had written the letters! What had they said her name was? Amberley. Isobel Amberley. Other names were there also which meant nothing to her: Viktor…Bruno…Miriam…Theo. One name did register, however: Julian. So Julian Carrington, too, had known of this, had perhaps been laughing at her behind her back, like all the others. That hurt. Eliot’s friend and, she had thought, hers too.

Well, it was a storm she could weather – even if Bernard Aubrey would not. She found, strangely (and it was a cathartic moment) how little she cared about this, and that she could even be contemptuous of his cowardice – and that it did not upset her anything like so much as the scorching shame that they had made a fool of her, Eliot and this woman. This woman who had the temerity to write and say she understood how difficult it was going to be for Eliot’s wife when he sold the Pontifex, asked for a divorce and sailed for a new life in America! How dare this nonentity pity her, the Honourable Edwina Martagon, daughter of the Earl of Chaddesley!

But…beyond all that was the death of that woman called Miriam. Odd words and phrases sprang at her off the pages, the same words she had erased from her memory after her first reading of them. The police suspect murder…terrible time here, so thankful you are in England…arrest and suicide…Viktor is beside himself…Sophie is having terrible nightmares…I must get her away from here…I am afraid for her…I cannot sleep… That impossible night, it has marked us all.

The police ought to know of this.

The thought came to Edwina and struck her with terror. Her humiliation would be made public. The world would make of these letters what they wanted to make of them. Murder, the unspeakable word. Eliot, intending to flee to the other side of the world. His suicide. An inescapable conclusion. Her husband’s good name and reputation, of which he’d always been so proud, would be dragged through the mire, dragging her and her children with it. She bowed her head, rested it on her clasped hands.

No one knew the contents of the letters, except Cynthia. Cynthia, who knew how to start whispers. But she wouldn’t dare, now, to start rumours flying around – would she? Especially if the evidence, if such it was, no longer existed.

With the letters and the little bag in her hand, she stood up. A fire blazed brightly in the grate. For several moments she stood looking down into the flames before stretching out her hand and dropping into its heart the pretty red pochette. The silk shrivelled and melted with a hiss into a small tarry mass and then disappeared into white-hot ash. She lifted the hand holding the letters and held them over the heart of the fire, the emerald in the ring Eliot had once given her winking in the flames; then at the last moment, she drew it back. For a moment she stood, uncharacteristically irresolute, one hand resting on the white marble fireplace, her eyes closed.

No! How could she believe, even after all this, that Eliot had been responsible for killing anyone? The man who had once loved her, fathered her children. An honourable man, a kind and loving father, a considerate husband, even to the end. Never! His suicide, inexplicable before, was understandable now – not through guilt at having killed a woman unknown to her, but because of his involvement with Isobel Amberley.

She walked across the room to her escritoire and put the letters into an envelope, sealed it and in her bold script addressed it to Chief Inspector Lamb. She rang the bell and when Manners answered, directed her to have the package sent at once, by hand.

She’d outmanoeuvred him, simply by misleading him over the time the money was to be deposited.

Lamb ought to have known that Edwina Martagon would do something like this, but he couldn’t forbear a wry smile. As it happened, no harm had been done by her reckless action. It went against the grain for him to feel that a miscreant had gone unnamed and unpunished but the objective had been achieved without fuss or danger. And Mrs Martagon, all credit to her, had turned the letters over to him.