The Birth of Blue Satan (28 page)

“Oh, sir, I apologize. I was not attending.”

He did not immediately recognize her. He had never paid her much mind, not with Isabella in the room.

“I am Mrs. Mayfield’s niece,” she reminded him. “Hester Kean is my name. I thank you for picking up my parcel.”

“Of course, Mrs. Kean. I remember you now. How is your cousin?”

Hester had forgotten in the confusion of the moment that he had planned to come back to demand an answer from Mrs. Mayfield. He seemed to have taken Isabella’s engagement very well, considering how insistent he had been.

“They are very well. I thank you, sir.” She curtsied, then took Mr. Shales’s parcel from his hand. She was glad it had been wrapped. It would have been awkward for Mr. Letchworth to know he had handled Harrowby’s ring.

“You may tell your aunt that I shall be by tomorrow. We have an important matter to discuss. I told her I should be back after taking the air in Bedfordshire. She will be expecting me.”

His tone as much as his words implied an ignorance of the true state of affairs. Although she could not like him, Hester felt she could not let him labour under a deception. She imagined the chagrin he would feel on speaking to her aunt on the morrow, although it was more likely that someone would break the news to him tonight. She thought she should try to soften the blow for him.

“I gather that you did not receive the London newspapers while you were gone, Mr. Letchworth, else you would have read the news concerning my cousin Isabella. She became engaged to Sir Harrowby Fitzsimmons, recently named Earl of Hawkhurst.”

For a moment, she thought that he had decided to take her news in graceful part, but in the next, he grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a desperate shake.

“That is a lie! Isabella Mayfield is mine!”

Hester tried to extricate herself from his grasp. “I assure you, sir, that I am speaking the truth. If you do not believe me, you may apply to my aunt. My only thought was to spare you the pain of a call.”

Hester’s footman, slow to notice anything was wrong, came up to them, and requested the gentleman to release Mrs. Kean.

Mr. Letchworth paid him no more attention than he would a pesky fly. “I will go and see her,” he said. As before, when she had seen him annoyed, angry knots appeared on both sides of his neck. His face was so dry beneath his cosmetics, she wondered how he could have fooled himself that a beauty like Isabella would consider marrying him.

“Here, what is going on? Sir? Madame?” A plainly clothed man came up Sherborne Lane behind Mr. Letchworth. “Mr. Letchworth, is that you?”

“Leave me alone, Vickers! Go back to your house and mind your own business!”

“I beg you to release me, sir,” Hester said in a clear voice. The man Vickers seemed reluctant to interfere. He stopped a few paces short of them to look on uncertainly.

“You may tell
your aunt
—” Mr. Letchworth nearly spat the words— “that I will be around to see her very soon. And I shall know who to blame for this.”

“Sir, won’t you let the lady go?” Mr. Vickers ventured timidly.

Mr. Letchworth loosened his grip and nearly thrust Hester from him—not, she supposed, because he had been requested to, but because he had said all he intended to say. He stalked off, and only then did Mr. Vickers and Hester’s footman show a proper degree of solicitude.

“Are you quite all right, madam?” Vickers asked. “Is there anything I can fetch you?”

He was staring inquisitively at her as if wondering what she had done to provoke his friend to such anger.

“I shall be all right when I have found our hackney coach and gone home.”

“Why do you not send your man for it? I shall be happy to wait here with you until it comes.”

Hester thanked him and asked the footman to fetch their coach.

“I would invite you into my house,” he said. “It is just here in the lane where Mr. Letchworth was so good as to seek my advice. But I fear you would find yourself uneasy accepting an invitation from a stranger.”

“You are very kind, sir. And quite right. I should much rather get home.”

“And where might that be, Mrs. . . .” He let his question trail expectantly.

“I am Mrs. Hester Kean, and I live in Westminster.”

“Oh.” His voice fell flat. “I take it you are not the young lady my friend hopes to make his wife?”

“No, she is my cousin. Although during Mr. Letchworth’s absence this week, she became engaged to another. That is why he was so upset.”

Mr. Vickers looked very grave. “Dear me,” he said, biting his upper lip. “I am certain he must have been very disappointed.”

A hackney carriage pulled up by the kerb, and Hester’s footman jumped down.

“I hope you will not hold his temper against him,” Mr. Vickers begged. “He has had a great deal to unsettle him of late. I would hate to see more added to his burden.”

“I will try not to blame him overmuch, sir.” Stifling her resentment, she disengaged herself and climbed into the carriage as hastily as she could. With her arms still hurting from Mr. Letchworth’s grasp, she would not be willing to forgive him all that soon, although she still pitied him.

Apparently, he had loved Isabella far more than she had given him credit for.

A hue and cry had been set up, and a reward of three hundred pounds had been posted for his capture.

When Tom delivered him the news, Gideon was constructing a plan to meet the Duke of Bournemouth. He had searched all day through the papers in Lade’s parlour, and had come up with the repeated fact that the Duke of Bournemouth was the only conspirator on the list who had gone over to the Hanoverians. The other names were very familiar to Gideon, as they would be to anyone, for they included a number of the most prominent Tories in Britain.

The Duke of Ormonde, the Duke of Marlborough’s great rival—an undoubted Jacobite—as well as others long suspected of leaning towards the Pretender—Bolingbroke, Strafford, Prior, and Attenbury, Bishop of Rochester. But none of these others had gone over to the Whigs. And none had threatened Gideon except the Duke of Bournemouth.

Even allowing for his own bias, Gideon could not deny that the Duke of Bournemouth was the only logical suspect on the list. The others were already under suspicion. They had retreated from Court. Murdering a fellow conspirator could only have exposed them to greater danger.

Only the Duke had much to lose.

Gideon had been thinking up a way to lure the Duke into a meeting when Tom arrived with the handbill, and the immediacy of his danger temporarily drove everything else from his mind.

His description had been spread all over the county. It could not possibly take long before someone, to whom the sum of three hundred pounds was an inconceivable fortune, would think of the stranger, Mr. Brown, who lodged at the Fox and Goose.

He became aware of Tom’s anxiety and forced a grin. “Well, it’s not nearly the hundred thousand placed on the Pretender’s head. Still, it’s not an unattractive sum. I suppose I should be flattered. Thank you for bringing me that information, Tom.”

“Shall I have Lade bring you a bottle of his good French wine?”

“So I can drown my sorrows in a rousing spate of drunkenness? I will admit, the notion has appeal. But I think we had better put our heads together and figure out how much it will cost me to keep friend Lade’s tongue quiet when he sees this handbill, which he undoubtedly will.”

Gideon could see that Tom had not thought of the danger from Lade, which was greater than the chance that someone else would recognize the Viscount St. Mars in this out-of-the-way place.

“This notice describes the clothes I was wearing when I escaped, right down to my wig. Fortunately it was brown and was lost. I shall make do with my own hair from now on, but surely Lade will recognize the ‘black mourning suit’ I was wearing when I stumbled in here.”

“I’m sure he’s noticed the ring you’re wearing, too. I’ve seen him eyeing it, as if he’d like to know how much it’d be worth if he pinched it. That’s in the notice, too. You had better take it off.”

Gideon looked down at the massive ring encircling his finger, with its death’s head wrought in finest gold. In a very short while, it had become more than an emblem of his mourning. He wore it in place of the signet that had belonged to his father, and which, by all rights, should be his. It reminded him of his father’s death and of the role he had played in it.

He toyed with the ring, turning it with his fingertips.

“No, Tom. I can’t take this off. Not until I’ve found my father’s killer.”

He could see that Tom was about to launch into a protest, so he cut him off. “It will not matter at any rate. With my hair a different colour from that description and modest clothes, I will be able to deceive most people. And Lade won’t need the ring to tip him off.

“Unfortunately we won’t be able to prevent him from putting two and two together, though, which means we will have to buy his cooperation.”

Tom herumphed. “And what’s to keep him from taking your money and the reward money, too?”

The only solution that presented itself struck Gideon as distasteful, but he knew that he couldn’t afford such qualms. Again, he realized how much his situation would force him to disguise his nature.

“I shall have to threaten him,” he said. “I will lead him to believe that if he betrays me, my band of confederates will make certain he suffers.”

“And what band of confederates would that be?”

At Tom’s wry tone, Gideon laughed for the first time that day. “Why, Tom, I am sure you can fill the positions alone. Haven’t you gone from being merely a groom to groom, valet, butler, and general man of business in just a pair of days? But, don’t worry—I won’t ask you to murder Lade. There’s simply no need for him to know how friendless I am at this juncture. Let him think I’ve got an army of villains to support me.”

A later thought came to worry him. “But what about the woman? Katy? Shall I have to frighten her, too?”

He was surprised by the look of shock on Tom’s face, followed by signs of an invisible struggle.

“No, sir,” Tom said, and the uneven tone of his voice suggested that the words were costing him aplenty. “I don’t think she would snitch on your lordship. She’d like a job—tending your lordship’s clothes. I told her it was no kind of work for a woman, but her father was a draper in Tunbridge Wells and she was used to dealing with fine folk, she said. I know it’s not the usual thing, but I don’t see how you would find a good man here in the Wild for the job.”

“You’re certain she wants it badly enough to resist that reward?”

Tom squirmed miserably. “I just don’t think she’s a squealer. But, yessir, she does want it very much.”

“Good. Tell her she may have the post with my blessing, and ask her to make me some clothes. I’ll want a couple of sober suits, of the kind a Quaker merchant might wear. And I should have some plain pairs of breeches and shirts like yours for riding out at night. I want clothes that will make me disappear.”

“She’ll be disappointed,” Tom said, as if he drew some comfort from that. “She had her mind set on sewing your lordship’s silks and satins.”

Gideon smiled. “Tell her I’ll let her make some of those, too. I should be ready for anything. In fact—” he recalled the plans he had been working on when Tom had returned — “I’ll be needing a good set of clothes very soon.”

With a grimace, he returned to the unpleasant chore in front of him. He stood and began collecting the incriminating papers. “Let’s have Lade in, then, and we’ll see what can be done with him before we set up household here.”

Gideon spent the next hour or two playing a mental game of chess with his landlord over a bottle of his fine French claret. He had alternately to woo and intimidate Lade without revealing the nature of his Achilles’ heel. And in the process he learned something about his host that could come in useful should he ever step out of line.

Although Lade was a thorough scoundrel of the sort who would have no qualms in cheating his own grandmother, he seemed to have one sentiment which, though founded on nothing but superstition, would provide a basis for dealing with him in a consistent manner. He had a thorough hatred for the Hanoverian Succession, and he blamed it for most of his ills.

Like others with no sense of right and wrong, he had to have a scapegoat to blame for his faults and their resulting miseries. The Jacobite principle that, in deposing the genuine heir to the throne, the English had invited a punishment from God, had taken root in his brain, to fester in a stew of self-pity and resentment.

As soon as Gideon got wind of this, he turned it to his advantage. Lade already believed him to be an escaped Jacobite of some sort. He was willing to believe, too, that a fellow partisan of the Pretender would need to set up his base in friendly territory. And he was more than ready to accept the inducements Gideon offered.

For a stipulated sum, far in excess of its real value, Gideon engaged to rent all the private rooms of the Fox and Goose, leaving only the public taproom for Lade to run. A regular income to be paid in advance was never to be refused. And Gideon made a sufficient number of veiled references and toasts to their “love o’er the Main” to confirm Lade in his early suspicions.