Plain Jane (19 page)

Jane looked at him sharply. ‘Are you
warning
me?’

‘Yes, I am warning you,’ said the much-goaded doctor. ‘I gather you have already caused a great deal of distress to Mr Bullfinch. You are a very clumsy little girl,’ he added with some venom.

Jane’s temper flared. ‘Let me tell you this, Mr Gillespie,’ she said coldly. ‘I am convinced there was something strange about Clara’s death and I will not rest until I have investigated the matter further.’ She rang the bell and asked Rainbird to show the doctor out.

‘Oh, how silly I am,’ thought Jane when he had gone. ‘I don’t care a fig about Clara Vere-Baxton anymore. I only wish this terrible pain at my heart would go away.’

When Mr Nevill called a half hour later, Jane persuaded him to take Mrs Hart with them to the Park and then spent an exhausting hour abovestairs talking her mother into getting up and dressed.

At last Mrs Hart allowed herself to be helped into the open carriage. As she had painted circles under her eyes and put heavy white
blanc
on her face in order to win the doctor’s sympathy, she indeed looked a figure of tragedy.

Once more she became an item of interest to the
ton
. After all, no one else in London had supplied such an amusing source of gossip as Mrs Hart and they had quite missed her. The stories of her wealth and genteel background quickly ousted the farmer’s daughter one and she was gratified to receive many kind enquiries after her health.

On the following day, cards and invitations began to arrive again. Mrs Hart rallied amazingly. It all went to show that a husband was not of much use anyway.

I confessed to my physician that there was something on my mind which agitated me so violently, that I could find no rest . . .

HARRIETTE WILSON
’
S MEMOIRS

The fact that Jane Hart had been told to leave the mystery of Clara alone, by Lord Tregarthan who had abused her innocence, and by Mr Gillespie whom she had taken in dislike, made her all the more determined to find out more about it.

With nothing but the occasional visits of Mr Nevill to occupy her mind, Jane once more set to work and badgered Rainbird for more information on the late Clara. All that Rainbird could add to what he had previously told her was that Clara had one female friend, a Miss Lucas, who was believed to be in London for her umpteenth Season. Despite the size of her dowry, she was considered exceeding plain and would not ‘take’.

Jane, puzzled, said that Miss Lucas seemed an odd sort of friend for the beautiful Clara. Rainbird primmed his lips and said he thought Miss Clara enjoyed the contrast between her own looks and those of Miss Lucas. It was another little thing added to the list of things already stored in Jane’s mind, which all added up to form one rather unpleasant character. This whetted her interest rather than otherwise. Now it appeared more and more as if Clara Vere-Baxton were just the type to get herself murdered.

Encouraged by what she began to believe to be Mr Nevill’s courtship of Jane, Mrs Hart decided to take her to a party that evening in Queen Street. There was no need to buy her a new gown. The one she had worn for the dinner in the honour of the Marquess of Berry would do. Jane was well aware there was nothing of the lover in Mr Nevill’s attentions and often wondered why he should seek her company so often, but she wished to go out in society to see if she could find Miss Lucas and so she did not say anything to make her mother think otherwise.

The party was given by a Mrs Grace Baillie in her curious apartments on the ground floor of an old-fashioned house in Queen Street. Mrs Baillie was good
ton
but not very rich. The rooms were small and ill-furnished and so she had hit upon a novel way of arranging them. All the doors were taken away, all the movables carried off, and the walls were covered with evergreens and set about with trees in pots, through the leaves of which peeped the lights of coloured lamps festooned with garlands of paper flowers. Passages, parlours, bedrooms, and cupboards were all adorned, and in various corners were surprises for the amusement of the visitors: a cage of birds, a stuffed figure in a bower, water trickling over mossy stones in an ivy-covered basin, a shepherdess in white muslin, a wreath, and a crook offering ices, a Highland laddie in a kilt presenting lemonade, a cupid with cake, a gypsy with fruit, along with many other contrived intricacies, which formed a sort of maze. It was called an Arcadian entertainment and the
ton
were so thrilled with it all that several wits were already sitting in corners composing verses in honour of the evening.

Jane wandered away from her mother and Euphemia and asked various people whether Miss Lucas was present. At last, a debutante said she had just seen Miss Lucas arriving and Jane threaded her way back through the maze of small rooms and passages towards the entrance. A few more enquiries and she found herself face to face with Miss Petronella Lucas. Miss Lucas had a long horse-like face and was wearing a girlish ensemble of muslin and pink roses, which accentuated the sallowness of her skin.

Unused to approaching strangers without a formal introduction and frightened of social censure – although surely it was not the same as approaching a
man
– Jane shyly said she was staying at Number 67 Clarges Street and that she had recently learned Miss Lucas had been a friend of the late Clara.

‘My poor Clara,’ said Miss Lucas with a little gasp. ‘How I miss her! Come apart. I would like to talk about her. I have never had such a friend since.’

She drew Jane a little aside into a rustic bower where there was a bench. Both ladies sat down together. Miss Lucas began to talk . . . and talk. Jane listened in increasing disappointment. According to Miss Lucas’s story, she, Miss Lucas, had been the belle of the Season and therefore confidante and adviser to the less fortunate Clara. The catalogue of Miss Lucas’s virtues went on and on.

People passed to and fro behind them and in front of them through the forest effect created by the evergreens while Jane wondered how she could escape. Miss Lucas appeared to be all eyes and teeth and made Jane feel like that unfortunate wedding guest who was trapped by the ancient mariner.

At last, when Miss Lucas paused for breath, Jane said, ‘But did Miss Vere-Baxton have any beau other than Mr Bullfinch?’

‘Well, as to that,’ said Miss Lucas, laying her finger alongside her nose in a most vulgar way, ‘Clara told me in confidence that . . . oh, I have dropped my fan.’

‘I think it fell under the seat,’ said Jane, rising. She leaned across Miss Lucas to see if the fan had fallen on that side of the bench when something made her twist round and look over her shoulder. A hand, a very white hand with a large mole on it, appeared through the shrubbery behind the bench. The hand held a dagger. It stabbed viciously down exactly at the point where Jane’s back would have been had she remained sitting.

Jane screamed and screamed.

Miss Lucas, not knowing what the matter was, but feeling that Jane was outdoing her in dramatics, began to scream as well. Soon they were surrounded by concerned faces.

Breathlessly Jane told them what had happened. After the initial shock and consternation, several of the gentlemen began to laugh and said it was no doubt another of Grace Baillie’s entertainments.

Mrs Baillie was appealed to. Although she knew nothing about it, she quickly grasped that the idea of a mysterious hand with a dagger could only add a welcome Gothic note and enhance her reputation as a hostess. To do her justice, Miss Lucas’s behaviour had convinced Mrs Baillie that both girls had been imagining things. So Mrs Baillie took the credit and Jane’s insistence that someone had tried to kill her was pooh-poohed.

Then Mrs Baillie got one of her own footmen armed with a wooden dagger to leap out at people from corners and so there was nothing Jane could do but insist she was sure the attack on her had not been a hoax. There had been something so deadly about that thrusting steel – and the footman did not have a mole on his hand.

She became too frightened to think of anything other than getting home. In any case because Miss Lucas was now laughing at her own fright and making a mockery of Jane’s screams to some bored listeners, she could not be encouraged to go on about Clara.

Jane wandered off in search of her mother. Mrs Hart was only too ready to leave. She had been at the far end of the rooms when Jane had been attacked and so did not know anything of her daughter’s scene. The Marquess of Berry had cut her and Euphemia was sulking. Mrs Hart pronounced the evening sadly flat.

They made their way through the intricate passages towards the street door.

Jane looked back with a shiver, wondering who it had been who had attacked her. It was then that she saw Mr Gillespie and Mr Bullfinch standing in an ante room, their heads together. As she stared, they both looked up and saw her.

Mr Gillespie gave his triangular smile and Mr Bullfinch smiled as well. Jane tried to drop a curtsy but her legs were shaking too much. She stumbled after her mother out of the house.

Rainbird was waiting for them when they arrived home. ‘A letter has arrived, delivered by one of Lord Tregarthan’s servants,’ he said, handing the sealed parchment to Mrs Hart.

She took it with the tips of her gloved fingers and looked at it disapprovingly. ‘No doubt it is another letter explaining he is
not
about to propose to Jane,’ she said crossly while Euphemia tittered. Jane blushed miserably and followed her mother and sister into the front parlour.

While Euphemia poured tea and complained about the Marquess of Berry, Mrs Hart crackled open the letter. She stared at it and then turned it over.

‘Why, it is from Mr Hart,’ she said faintly. She fumbled in her bosom for her quizzing glass while Jane carried a branch of candles and set it on a table beside her.

Mrs Hart read the letter slowly and then read it again with many ‘bless-my-souls’ until both Euphemia and Jane felt they would die from curiosity.

‘All
most
irregular,’ said Mrs Hart at last. ‘Your father and Lord Tregarthan appear to have gone to France to rescue an English family’ – she raised the letter and squinted at it through her glass – ‘the Hambletons, from a prison in Rouen where they had been incarcerated by Napoleon’s troops. It all had to be done in the greatest secrecy, which is why he says he was unable to tell me anything. They are at Dover, or rather, that is where Mr Hart sent this letter from. Felice went with them as interpreter. Baggage! Mr Hart stood by with a schooner on the coast while Lord Tregarthan went to rescue them. It seems they needed Felice to ask questions in the town and find out which of the guards would be most likely to accept a bribe. They were chased by Napoleon’s troops and only escaped by a hairsbreadth.’

‘Felice had no right to be so sly,’ complained Euphemia. ‘I would not take her back if I were you, mama.’

‘She is not coming back,’ said Mrs Hart. ‘Lord Tregarthan has supplied her with a dowry and she has gone to live in Brighton. Pah! Paying off his mistress, no doubt.’

Jane looked at her mother in a kind of wonder. Could she, Jane Hart, possibly dislike her own mother? As Mrs Hart prattled on, reading the letter out loud over and over again, Jane remembered that interview with Lord Tregarthan in the kitchen. Now that she knew he had been on the brink of a perilous adventure rather than a journey to see his tailor, his behaviour began to seem as if it might contain more of the lover than the fop.

But Jane was afraid of hoping too much. Lord Tregarthan would surely now be more beyond her reach than ever. He would return a hero and be fêted and courted. Jane thought of Felice and felt a stab of jealousy that the lady’s maid should be allowed to share the adventure.

And yet, taken up as she was with thoughts of Lord Tregarthan, wondering how she should treat him on his return – coldly, a dignified nod, or to a casual smile and a handshake? – she had not forgotten the mystery of Clara. Someone had tried to kill her at Mrs Baillie’s. Someone who would try to kill again.