The Sleeping Partner (24 page)

When she opened the door she was astonished to find it was Sir Adam Brereton who had been knocking so vigorously. Behind him was Cole, wearing an expression of abject apology.

“Ad—
Sir
Adam?” Miss Tolerance replaced the pistol on the shelf nearest the door.

“Mrs. B said to bring him over, miss.”

“You are hurt!” Sir Adam informed her.

“Yes, and tired, too. It is all right, Cole. I know the gentleman. It is perfectly safe to leave him with me.”

“Perfectly safe! What do you mean?” Sir Adam looked from her to Cole and back again.

“Come in, Adam. It is chilly, and at least one of us is not dressed for talking on the doorstep by moonlight.” Miss Tolerance stood back to admit her brother, then closed the door. “To what do I owe this extraordinary honor?”

“What do you mean, perfectly safe?” Sir Adam asked again.

“I know my life seems to you quite irregular, but I do not generally make a habit of entertaining men at this hour. My aunt’s staff are a little protective. And you did appear distraught.”

“They thought I might…” Sir Adam shook his head. “I came only to see if it was true you had been hurt.”

It was now Miss Tolerance who was surprised. “Yes, it is true. But how did you know of it? And why—if I may ask—do you care?”

“Why do I care? You’re my sister, for God’s sake! Do I need any more license than that?”

Miss Tolerance began to laugh. “You come and rouse me from my bed in order to express your concern?”

“You were struck down in the street! I thought you were at death’s door.” Sir Adam was sulky now.

“Good God, Adam, a week ago you were disappointed to know I was not dead! I was struck a blow to the head, but thanks, as I am assured by the surgeon who attended me, to the weight of my hair and the thickness of my skull, I am only a little the worse for it. ‘Tis the nature of my work; sometimes people object to what I am doing and attempt to stop me.”

“But to hurt you—”

Miss Tolerance regarded her brother with impatience. “I am no longer a lady, Adam. I am a Fallen Woman, and the world uses such as rudely as we will suffer them to do. I am not brutalized; I am not starving; I do not swill gin to numb the pain of blows from a whoremaster or the itch of the clap. When I ran away with Connell my life changed.
I
changed. If it makes it easier, you need no longer consider me your sister. Indeed, I thought that had happened long ago.”

Sir Adam’s horror had give way to bewilderment; now it seemed that was to be replaced with anger. “If you force the new acquaintance upon me, do you expect me to have no feeling for you?”

“I did not—” She stopped and sighed in frustration. “Adam, I told you who I was because it seemed unwise not to do so. Had the secret come out through no work of mine or yours, would you not have felt ill-used? I did not identify myself in order to curry favors from you. I am what I am. I do what I do. And sometimes someone takes a sword or a stick and makes an attempt to stop me. They have not yet succeeded.”

“And I still have a sister.”

The declaration moved Miss Tolerance. “You do, and shall, if you choose to claim her. No, not publicly! I do not intend to force your acquaintance. I stand by the assurances I gave you when we first spoke: your wife will never learn from me who I am. But now you know that I am alive and where I am, I certainly shall not turn you away if you choose to call upon me. Although—” she gestured at her nightdress and cap—”perhaps at a more convenient hour.”

Sir Adam made a sound somewhere between a snort and a laugh. “Perhaps. But Sal—Sarah, you were not badly hurt?”

“Not badly, no. I lost most of today to a wretched headache—”

“Well, yes, you would do. D’you remember when I was thrown during the hunt? I laid abed for a week, could barely open my eyes—” Sir Adam broke off his reminiscence. “Should you not still be abed?”

Miss Tolerance smiled. “I was. No, no, Adam. It is now several days since I was struck. I am much recovered. But tell me: how do you come to be here? Yes, I know you heard I was hurt. But how? In my note to Lady Brereton I did not say I had been attacked.”

Sir Adam considered. “I thought Clary—Lady Brereton—I thought she—” he sat heavily on the settle before the dark hearth and counted on his fingers as if numbering actions there. “The family was all together in Lyne’s drawing room. My wife was playing on the pianoforte, and Lyne and I were playing backgammon.” That was the thumb. “Your note was delivered—” the forefinger. “Lyne asked what it was and Clary—Lady Brereton—told us it was a report from you, that you apologized, that you had been unable to pursue inquiries for several days—” that was the third finger. “She went up to dress for dinner.” The fourth finger. “Lyne and I stayed to finish our game. Henry and John were watching. Someone said something.”

“Something?” Miss Tolerance suppressed her impatience. “About me? “

“Yes. The mention of you put Lyne all out of temper, then Henry said something very coarse about women who went out looking for…looking for trouble.” Miss Tolerance was certain that
trouble
had not been the word Henry Thorpe had used. “Of course John took exception, and the two of them began to bicker. Who was it? Someone said something, but as to who it was—”

“What did they say?” Miss Tolerance pressed.

“I don’t recall exactly. It’s the devil of a thing. But I was left with the notion that you had been injured. Struck down in the street.”

“Did someone say those words?”

“I don’t know. Dammit, Sally, I wasn’t taking it all down like a damned clerk.” Sir Adam had lost the count of his fingers and looked up at his sister. “But when I went up to change I had begun to worry.”

“This was all before dinner?”

Sir Adam nodded. “We had no engagement tonight, so I waited until Clary—Lady Brereton—went up to bed, then I came here.”

“And you cannot recall who among them—Lord Lyne or his sons—suggested that I had been struck down, or how they learned of it.” Miss Tolerance did not want to call attention to the question with her brother, whose discretion she did not entirely trust. “Perhaps there was a note of my injury in the
Times,
” she said at last.

The cloud upon Sir Adam’s brow lifted. “Oh, very likely,” he agreed. For the first time since he had entered her cottage he looked about him, taking in the tidy room: sturdy furnishings with no pretension to elegance, two rag-rugs made by Miss Tolerance’s own hands, a shelf of books and ledgers on the far side of the tiled fireplace. After the elegance of Lyne House and the sensual luxury of Mrs. Brereton’s establishment it doubtless seemed meager to her brother.

“What’s that?” Sir Adam had spied the pocket watch Miss Tolerance kept upon the mantle. “Connell’s watch! I remember he used it to time my footwork; I hated the damned thing. How come you to—” he stopped, blushing.

“He left me the watch, and his sword and hanger, and his riding crop,” Miss Tolerance said softly. “Everything else I had to sell in order to return home.”

Sir Adam appeared to have been struck by an original and peculiar thought. “Sally, were you happy?”

“Yes, Adam. Despite the inconvenience and the danger we were very happy.”

Sir Adam had asked the question, but now seemed uncomfortable with so straightforward an answer. “Well,” he said at last. “You seem to be comfortable enough here. And you have seen a doctor for that bump on the head?”

Miss Tolerance began to nod and stopped herself. “In a day or so I shall be quite recovered. What I chiefly need is rest.”

Her brother took her hint. “I shan’t keep you from your bed, then. Good night, Sally.”

Miss Tolerance followed him to the door. “Good night, Sir Adam.” She closed the door behind him and locked it.

In the middle of the night Miss Tolerance woke, panting, from a violent dream. She sat upright in her bed, staring at the shifting patterns of silvery moonlight on her counterpane and attempting to quiet her breathing and slow her heartbeat. There was something in the dream, something her sleeping mind had teased out of her, but waking had driven the thought away. She took long, slow draughts of cool air. A scent, not a real scent but a remembered one, lingered with her: coppery and warm, dangerous. Blood. Had she been dreaming of blood? It would not be the first time.

Miss Tolerance slid her feet from under the blankets, lit a candle, and went to fetch a notebook and a stub of pencil. Like many young women of good family she had spent some of her youth under the authority of a drawing master. She was the first to acknowledge that she had little talent. Still, the habit of making tiny sketches in the margins of her ledgers, or of essaying larger composition as a way of recalling something, had not left her. She returned to the warmth of her bed with the notebook upon her lap, put pencil to paper, and waited for inspiration.

She drew a series of arches and rectangles which, with the suggestions of heads and arms attached, became a large room filled with clerks seated at desks, applying themselves to their work. Rows of desks and clerks stretched into the distance, but in the foreground, as she added details, Miss Tolerance realized that one of the desks was empty. On what would have been the ground before that desk she drew a man. He lay on his back, one arm thrown up, the other drawn across his belly. In the throes of inspiration she drew a scarf around the man’s throat in light and dark bands which she realized were the same colors she had noted earlier on Mrs. Brereton’s shawl: red and gray. She sketched in the man’s features lightly, the suggestion of a nose and cheekbones broken and swollen, the eyes closed, the mouth gaping and bloodied. On the man’s left cheek, a mark.

The pattern of leaf and shadow danced on her bed. Miss Tolerance stared at her drawing. What was there she had never seen in life, she was certain. Had she seen a man bludgeoned to death under the unconcerned gaze of his fellows she would have remembered it. Who was the man, then? After a moment she realized it was the poor corpse she had seen that morning with Sir Walter in Primrose Street. The sight must have made a far greater impression upon her than she had realized.

Her pencil went back to his face. She blackened the mark upon the cheek, damning her disordered memory. There was something she should know. Had the victim in Primrose Street had such a mark on his face? And if he had not, had she seen anyone of late who did? Slowly, as if spinning threads together into a skein of yarn, she pulled the memories into a coherent whole. An office indeed, but with only three desks. An old man; a large, brutal looking one with a sneering lip; a younger one with a strawberry mark on his left cheek and a gray and red scarf wrapped twice around his neck. The man in Primrose Street, the man with John Thorpe’s direction in his pocket, had been Mr. Abner Huwe’s clerk.

Chapter Thirteen

Miss Tolerance woke early and sent a note to Sir Walter Mandif, inquiring if the man killed in Primrose Street had had a strawberry mark on his left cheek. “If he does, I may be able to offer some assistance,” she wrote. Best not to be too certain upon the evidence of a dream. She signed and sanded the letter, sealed it, and brought it to Keefe for delivery.

“I have your mail, Miss Sarah,” the porter told her. “I didn’t want to trouble you with it yesterday as you looked right done up.” He offered her two letters and two grubby twists of paper. “From them boys.”

Them boys. Well, nothing was so likely to give her a sense of what she had missed—or not—as the reports from her street-sweeps. Miss Tolerance thanked him and took the mail back to her cottage.

Miss,
the first report began.

The ol Lorchip gone to his club on St James Street and stad there until dinner. The Ladychip wint to bond Street to a glover shop, and to a sparkers
(what could that mean? Miss Tolerance wondered. A jeweler was her best guess
). She come ome and then gone out later wiv her usband in a coash, dressed to turn out yer eyes. Han’t seen sign of the young gennelmens.

Nothing remarkable in that report except the spelling, Miss Tolerance thought. She uncurled the second one.

Miss

The ol Lorchip wint out early to a coffe ouse in Fleet street to drink coffee wiv that red hared man. His coat was brown today. Then the ol lorchip wint to a bootmaker in St Jams street and to his club.

The young Ladychip gone out to visit friends in Duke Street. When she come ome the two gents come to visit too. Then the yonger gent gone back to Pitfeld Stret. The mean young gent gone off wiv the Lorship to Durry Lane, but Charlie ad to be ome afore they left it.

Again the red-haired man, who was apparently Mr. Abner Huwe.

Miss Tolerance took up slate and chalk from her writing desk and began to make notes. Abner Huwe, the proprietor of a shipping business; Lord Lyne, owner of properties overseas. There was no reason why the two men should not meet, although it still seemed odd to her that Lyne himself would meet so often with a man such as Huwe—Lyne seemed to keep himself well above the company of tradesmen. Miss Tolerance considered further. Had Huwe lied, or merely been mistaken, about where Lyne’s property was located and what his business might have been? It was possible he had genuinely confused Lyne’s holdings in South America for the West Indies, but Huwe struck her as the sort of man who rarely forgot anything. It was also possible that he had misled her out of some desire to protect the privacy of Lyne’s business. This desire Miss Tolerance could sympathize with, and yet she had a hard time ascribing such scruples to Huwe. And why would Baron Lyne meet the shipper in a coffeehouse in a neighborhood which neither man was likely to frequent? It smelled wrong to Miss Tolerance’s nose, and she was inclined to trust that organ.

And there was the matter of the man in Primrose Street. She was waiting to hear from Sir Walter, but if the corpse had, in life, been Mr. Huwe’s clerk, there was another and curious link back to Lord Lyne. Or at least to Squale House and Mr. John Thorpe.