The Devlin Diary (27 page)

But it’s only a cursory notion, for what strikes Hannah even more forcefully as she faces Madame Severin is the sense that the widow harbors a secret, and the invisible presence of it seems as evident to Hannah as something she might actually see or touch. She thinks back to their every meeting, almost daily now for weeks, and realizes that this particular feeling always accompanies the madame. In the beginning she’d thought that Madame Severin’s air of mystery had its origins in her exalted, almost mocking, attitude of mourning, or the dramatic events surrounding her disfigured face. But these were not secrets; indeed, the widow made certain that everyone knew of her past, which seemed to be a source of pride for her, not shame. It was something else. Something dark, guilty. Something Madame Severin would never willingly admit to. This sudden, certain knowledge unsteadies Hannah, but she quickly regains her composure and curtsies in greeting. Madame Severin dispenses with the niceties altogether.

“Recently a young lady came to you for help.” It’s a statement, not a question, and Madame Severin requires no sign of confirmation to continue. “There is no need to mention any names. You must forget you ever spoke with her—indeed, that you ever met her at all.”

Hannah bristles at being addressed in such an imperious manner, but she won’t pretend she doesn’t know to whom the madame is referring. Ever since Jane Constable first approached her, Hannah has expected the girl to seek her out again, but she never has. Hannah even made up a list of simples and compounds believed to bring on the terms. Not that she felt comfortable recommending any of them. Some were useless, others were poisons.
Poisons
. A thought nags at her, something she should but can’t quite remember, but at the moment she
is most concerned about Jane. Why is Madame Severin taking such an interest in her welfare?

“Is this what the young lady wishes?” Hannah asks.

“Indeed it is. It appears that she was mistaken in her beliefs.”

“She is well, then? With no…worries?”

“I suggest that you put all thoughts of this lady from your mind. You are to relate to no one anything you have heard of her. If I hear even the merest hint of a rumor, I will know that you are the source. My vengeance will be swift and impossible to trace.”

Is Madame Severin truly dangerous or simply mad? Hannah decides to err on the side of caution. “You have my promise that what was told to me in confidence will remain so.” She curtsies again, signaling an end to their conversation, and makes her best effort at a smile. Her dismissive gesture is not lost on Madame Severin, who gives her one last lacerating look before she turns and glides away.

Good Lord, what a night. Hannah takes another sip of the wine, but it tastes bitter. Perhaps the aftertaste of the laudanum in her mouth has soured it. Or perhaps it’s indicative of the way the entire evening is progressing. The ache in her head makes her more aware of the din of hundreds of voices, the smothering, sweet, overheated air. She walks back to the Great Hall, looking for Montagu. If she does not improve, she can always ask him to take her home.

The dancing continues, although the king and Louise have apparently retired for the evening. Montagu too is still absent; she meanders through groups of courtiers on both sides of the dance floor without seeing him. She decides to go check on Lucy and Hester, but as she turns toward the staircase she finds Edward Strathern blocking her path.

“Good evening, Mrs. Devlin.”

He is stylishly attired in a velvet coat the smoky hue of a black pearl, paired with a gray silk waistcoat that matches the storm-cloud color of his eyes. He is taller than she remembered, a full head higher than herself, and stands with a dignified bearing. His cheek is smooth, and every groomed hair is in place. His hands are clean and perfectly manicured. She hardly noticed before how handsome he is: those deep
gray eyes stare out of an even-featured, strong-jawed face, in which intelligence and good breeding claim equal measure. He’s perfect, almost too perfect, she thinks; but it’s no wonder that the elegant lady in gray would want to marry him.

“I have desired to speak to you all evening, but it seems you are constantly in Mr. Montagu’s company.” His manner is strangely accusatory.

“He is my escort for the evening,” Hannah replies. “What do you have to say that requires such privacy?”

Instead of answering, Strathern looks past her into the crowd. She turns to see Montagu making his way toward them.

“May I have the next dance?” Edward asks.

She hesitates. She would rather wait for Montagu to partner her.

“The music is starting,” he says insistently. “Please, may I have the next dance?”

Hannah is about to turn down his request when Montagu stops to talk to a pretty young lady. Hannah watches the woman flirt with him, tapping him lightly on the cheek with her fan. It’s a wanton gesture, but Montagu smiles in return, then takes her hand and kisses it. Hannah knows she should not let this disturb her, it’s a common sight in a flirtatious court, but all at once everything feels uncomfortable and strange. The music and the constant clamor slow and echo, the sound breaking over her in waves.

“Are you all right?” Strathern asks.

“Of course,” she replies. “Shall we join the dance?”

After the requisite bow and curtsy, Strathern awkwardly takes her hand as they promenade along the dance floor with the other couples. It’s odd, but after his insisting that she dance with him, Hannah has the distinct feeling that he does not want to touch her. They return to their original place on the floor and face each other.

“You are in Mr. Montagu’s company a great deal, I have heard,” Strathern remarks.

So she’s the subject of court gossip after all. But it hardly matters when there’s nothing substantial to gossip about. Not yet, at least. “Why should this be your concern?”

“Mr. Montagu is not all that he seems. Or perhaps I should say he is more than he seems.” He takes her hand again as they step closer together.

“How do you know of Mr. Montagu?”

“He was ambassador while I was studying in Paris. He cut quite a swath through that city. He is known for ruining every woman he is associated with—not only their reputations but their lives.”

“Surely you cannot be speaking of the same man. Mr. Montagu has always treated me with respect and admiration.”

“I do believe he admires you, but he will never have any serious intentions toward you. Everyone knows that his only true interest is money.”

“Odd for you of all people to lay that charge at his feet. You’ve made a profitable match, why shouldn’t he?”

The doctor looks deeply uncomfortable at the mention of his impending nuptials. “Money was not my first consideration. I tell you it will be his only concern when it comes to marriage. Otherwise, he is known to prey on women without friends or protectors, women he can dally with without consequence.”

“Do you mean to imply that is the sort of woman I am?”

“That is not at all what I meant. I simply meant to warn you.”

“You take an eager interest in this role.” Too eager, for a man who’s just told her that he is marrying for love. “I do not think it suits you, under the circumstances.” The circumstances of his engagement, she means; and by his guilty glance she knows he has understood her. “Please let us drop the subject.”

He slips his hand onto her waist for a turn. She feels his hesitation. Perhaps his uncertainty is nothing more than his unfamiliarity with the dance. Although Dr. Strathern appears to know the steps, he does not dance with Montagu’s confident grace.

“Have you thought any more about our conversation of last week?” he asks.

“A little.” More than a little, but she does not want to let on how much.

“I told Lord Arlington about the wounds on Osborne’s body, but
I have not told him of my suspicions regarding Sir Henry or your father.”

“Perhaps it’s best to keep those suspicions to yourself.”

“Do you not want to find your father’s killer?”

“I think the past should be left in the past.” Except that there’s something she should tell him, something important. If she could only remember. She feels overwhelmed by the dancing, the heat, the noise. Faint and dizzy. Dr. Strathern’s face appears very far away, then very near.

“Are you all right?” he asks. His voice sounds unnaturally slow. “Mrs. Devlin!”

She attempts to speak, but he is too far away for her words to reach him. The room spins, a sickening blur of light and color, and she hears him faintly calling her name. She cannot answer, for she feels herself falling, falling endlessly, falling soundlessly, falling into darkness.

Fourth week of Michaelmas term

I
T WAS A
walk of only fifteen minutes or so, and a very pleasant one, to Magdalene College and the Pepys Library. They could have gone online to find information about tachygraphy, but why bother when you could go straight to the source? Andrew had queried, and Claire had agreed. It was simply another benefit of living in a library-rich town; Cambridge could boast of more than one hundred.

They decided to take the most scenic route and stroll north along the Backs and through St. John’s College. But as soon as they walked out of Trinity, they caught sight of the yellow crime scene tape cordoning off a section of grass near the stream where Derek Goodman’s body was found. Claire quickly looked away and saw Andrew do the same. The fiction that they were making their way though the cold, blustery afternoon solely to learn about an obscure form of writing was shattered, and the unpleasant reality reasserted itself. It had been a rather flimsy fiction in the first place, Claire supposed.

All summer she’d been envisioning exactly this, walking with Andrew Kent along the picturesque bank of the River Cam or in the cloisters of medieval courtyards and talking about—well, it hadn’t really mattered what they’d have been talking about. She’d imagined
watching the changing expressions in his earnest and intelligent eyes, hearing the soothing, low pitch of his voice and the gratifying sound of his laughter.

Her summer daydreams now seemed like a naive fantasy. Her mind wandered back to Venice. On the night they’d deciphered Alessandra Rossetti’s letters, she and Andrew had walked together through the Piazza San Marco to a friend’s palazzo on the Grand Canal. How comfortable they had been with each other, how close, even. Now, even though Andrew was unfailingly polite, Claire knew that their burgeoning intimacy had come to a full stop. He was cautious around her, never standing too close or looking too long into her eyes. The very air between them seemed weighted with the things they couldn’t say.

“The story of Roger Osborne’s murder begins with Princess Henriette-Anne, Charles the Second’s little sister, his junior by fourteen years,” Andrew said. “The English Civil War began while she was still an infant; in fact, when Queen Henrietta-Maria took her children to France to live in exile, Henriette-Anne was considered too young to travel. Two years later she was smuggled out of England by a lady-in-waiting and lived with her mother in Paris while Charles the First waged a losing war against Cromwell and the Parliamentary forces.

“Henriette-Anne lived the rest of her life within the milieu of the French court. At first, while England was ruled by Cromwell, she was considered a poor relation—she and her siblings were first cousins of Louis the Fourteenth. Once Charles the Second regained his throne in 1660, Henriette-Anne came into her own as a proper English princess. In 1661, when she was sixteen, she married Louis’ brother, Philippe, Duc d’Orleans, also her cousin. The alliance was political, of course, as noble marriages were, but it was notable for its lack of love or affection, and even cruelty, on the duc’s part. By all accounts Henriette-Anne was a sweet, refined, gentle soul. She was a dutiful sister, who revered her brother Charles and her cousin King Louis and she tried to make the best of an unpleasant situation, but I suspect that she was never happy.

“In the latter part of the 1660s, Charles began to seek a closer alliance with France. Although England and Holland, as two Protestant countries, had more in common than England and France did, the
Dutch had been making incursions into English shipping routes that the English had been unable to stop on their own; with France’s help they could declare war. But this goal of a closer alliance with France had to be pursued in secret, as it would mean breaking a treaty that England had recently signed with Holland and Sweden, and it meant going against the wishes of a vociferously anti-French, anti-Catholic Parliament. Charles had to tread very carefully, as he needed Parliament to raise funds for his continually cash-strapped treasury.

“Who better to be the liaison between Charles and Louis than Henriette-Anne? She was delighted to be needed by the two men she loved, and she took to the task of uniting England and France with an almost missionary zeal. It took more than a year of negotiations, but in June of 1670, Charles and Henriette-Anne met at Dover, along with hundreds of English and French courtiers. The king and the duchess had not seen each other in ten years, since Henriette-Anne was sixteen and had traveled to England prior to her marriage. It was a joyous reunion for both. Charles doted on his little sister, whom he adored as much as she adored him. This happy occasion was celebrated with feasts, dances, comedies, and ballets. But the true purpose of the reunion was a new treaty between England and France, negotiated by Charles’s ministers Lord Arlington and Sir Thomas Clifford and the French ambassador to England, Colbert de Croissy. The treaty was in essence a pact to wage war on the Dutch: Charles wanted to reassert England’s maritime supremacy, and Louis laid claim to territories in the Spanish Netherlands.

“The treaty was signed at Dover, and Charles and his little sister bade a tearful farewell. Only a few weeks later, Henriette-Anne was back at Saint-Cloud in Paris when she suffered excruciating stomach pains and suddenly died. There were rumors of poison, which later proved to be unfounded. Apparently she died from the perforation of a peptic ulcer. Her last hours were reportedly quite gruesome.”

“But what does all this have to do with the death of Roger Osborne?”

“Osborne had been part of the English contingent at Dover. When Henriette-Anne returned to Paris, he was one of a handful of English courtiers who accompanied her. No one knows precisely why. Right
before she died, Henriette-Anne entrusted Osborne with a gold ring and a secret.”

“What secret?”

“No one knows. But it’s long been speculated that a connection exists between that night at Saint-Cloud and his murder in London two years later.”

Exactly how a diary written by an English doctor could provide insight into a centuries-old mystery was not at all clear, but Claire knew from past experience that a careful reading of documents such as these could reveal secrets long obscured. It had certainly been true in Venice, where she and Andrew had found that Alessandra Rossetti’s letters to her cousin contained secret, coded messages. Claire felt a tingle of excitement at the possibility of a new discovery. That the diary was written by a female doctor—that’s if Robbie Macintosh’s memory was accurate—was an additional source of interest. Female physicians had been uncommon in the late seventeenth century, but not unheard of. Claire had read of female practitioners of all sorts: midwives, tooth-pullers, bone-setters, apothecaries, surgeons. But a female physician who’d ministered to the king’s mistress? That was promising, indeed. But how could they be certain that Robbie Macintosh was telling the truth? He’d seemed awfully nervous about something.

“Didn’t you think that Robbie Macintosh was acting strangely?” Claire asked Andrew as they passed through St. John’s Chapel Court and headed toward Magdalene Street.

“Robbie? Why, no, not at all.”

“I thought he seemed anxious. Upset, even.”

“Of course he was upset. He’d just found out that his supervisor died.”

“It seemed as if he was reacting to something more than that. As if—”

Andrew skewered Claire with a skeptical look. “Are you going to suspect everyone you meet from now on of being a murderer?”

“Of course not. But you can’t deny that he was acting strange.”

“How would you know?”

“Because I saw him. I observed him.”

“But you’ve never met him before.”

“So?”

“So you have nothing with which to compare his behavior.”

“What difference does that make?”

“It makes a great deal of difference, I should think. How can you know if someone is acting oddly if you don’t know how they act normally?”

“It isn’t necessary to have a baseline of normal behavior to judge aberrant behavior against. Odd is simply odd—anyone can see it. Or, at least, most people can see it, if they’re paying attention.”

“What exactly do you mean by that?”

“You don’t always pick up on the subtleties, do you?”

“Are you trying to insult me, or are you just doing it inadvertently?”

“I wasn’t trying to insult you. I’m just saying that you don’t always seem to—”

“Notice the nuances of human behavior?” He made a harrumphing sound as he walked under the archway marked with the inscription
BIBLIOTECA PEYPSIANA
1724,
commemorating the date the library was installed. “Yes, I’m sure that’s a wonderfully attractive quality,” he said grumpily as he stomped up the stairs ahead of her.

“Of course I’ve heard about Dr. Goodman. I’m terribly sorry.” Nora Giles, the Pepys librarian, had risen from her desk and walked across the gleaming wood floor to greet them, the tap of her high heels echoing in the otherwise silent room. She was in her late twenties, of partial African descent, with a posh accent that placed her in England’s upper crust. She was stunningly attractive, with flawless coffee-and-cream skin and shining black hair that she wore in short, bouncy curls. Her shapely figure strained against her businesslike silk blouse and tight pencil skirt. She was rather glamorous for a librarian. No, Claire corrected herself, Nora Giles was rather glamorous, period. She looked as if she’d be more at home singing jazz standards in a nightclub than babysitting a bunch of old books.

“Had you seen Dr. Goodman recently, by any chance?” Andrew asked. He seemed unaffected by the librarian’s potent appeal. Perhaps
this quirk of not noticing everything was a positive quality, in the long run.

She took her time answering such a simple inquiry, and a seemingly innocuous one. “Yes,” Nora finally said, “in fact I did see him just a few days ago.” As she spoke, she twisted the engagement ring that graced her well-manicured hand. Perhaps it wasn’t nervous tension, however, but simple discomfort. The ring was rather large, after all, with a center diamond approximately the size of a Mini Cooper. Poor thing, Claire sympathized. Beastly ring probably got in the way when she was trying to shelve books and so forth. “Dr. Goodman was researching seventeenth-century speed-writing and stopped by to ask a few questions,” Nora added. The cherry red gloss on her full lips glistened seductively in the warm light from a brass chandelier.

Andrew’s eyebrows hiked up. “Really?” Claire had heard that tone before, one that managed to insinuate disbelief without coming right out and calling someone a liar. But why was he using it with Nora Giles? Why was he suddenly so suspicious?

“Yes,” Nora answered. “He was writing a paper for one of the journals.” She seemed more confident now, as if she was on more familiar territory.

“Coincidentally,” Andrew said, “we’re also here to pick your brain about the sort of code Pepys used in his diary. But this is Dr. Donovan’s first time here. Perhaps we could…?”

“Of course,” Nora replied smoothly, then offered to take them on a quick tour. They followed her to the room where the collection was kept in tall glass-fronted oak bookcases, specially designed by the diarist to accommodate his three-thousand-volume library. The books were arranged, rather unusually, from the smallest to the largest.

An alumnus of Magdalene College, Samuel Pepys had bequeathed his library to his alma mater at his death. “His six-volume diary was part of the collection,” Nora explained, “but no one knew of its existence. Although he wrote in his diary nearly every day for nine years, he kept it a secret even from his wife and his closest friends. So here they languished until John Evelyn’s diaries were successfully published in 1818. The then master of Magdalene decided that Pepys’s diaries should be transcribed,
so he hired John Smith, a poor, struggling undergraduate, to do it. It took Smith three years, working almost every day. When he finally completed the project in 1822, the three thousand diary pages added up to over nine thousand pages of handwritten text—and, of course, one of the most complete and personal accounts of the Restoration era.

“The sad and ironic footnote to this story is that John Smith never knew that the key to the ‘code’ was here in the library all the time. It’s not really a code per se, but a form of shorthand made popular by a man named Thomas Shelton. The book that Pepys used as a guide is right here.”

She crossed to one of the bookcases and opened the glass front, taking out a copy of Thomas Shelton’s
Tachygraphy, The most exact & compendious method of short and swift writing that hath ever yet been published by any.
Pepys’s binder had bound it in brown calf and stamped Pepys’s coat of arms on the front.

“Any chance we could borrow this?” Andrew asked.

Nora laughed. “You should know better, Dr. Kent. Sorry, but no.”

Andrew took the photocopied diary page from his coat pocket and opened it for her. “Can you decipher this?”

Nora studied it for a moment. “Not right away, no. It looks like tachygraphy, but it’s not exactly like Pepys or Shelton,” she said.

“Then what is it?” Claire asked.

“A personal cipher, based on Shelton’s system. His method was often used as a prototype, but people tended to develop their own code—their own way of speedwriting unique to themselves. In addition, as I’m sure you know, Dr. Kent, in the seventeenth century there was no such thing as a dictionary or standardized spelling. People wrote words phonetically, and they often wrote the same word in a variety of ways.”

“So it’s like translating another language,” Claire said.

“It can be daunting, but it’s not quite that bad. It is English, after all. If you really want to try to decipher this, I’d suggest reading Shelton’s book. Although I can’t loan you our copy, the text is easy enough to acquire. Not only is
Tachygraphy
available online but so are a few other seventeenth-century books on speedwriting. Early English Books Online it’s called. You’ll have access through the university.”