Bethlehem Road (22 page)

Desperation was the element! She must use as much of the truth as possible. She must find a reason she could He about convincingly; emotions were far harder to stimulate. She was at her wits’ end ... and she needed to know—that was it! She needed to know the whereabouts of a mutual friend, someone from those far-off days, and her extremity had driven her to seek Mary Carfax. Mary would believe that. But who should she say she was searching for? It must not be someone in such current circulation that Zenobia should have found her for herself. Ah! Beatrice Allenby was just the person. She had married a Belgian cheesemaker and gone to live in Bruges! No one could be expected to know that as a matter of course. And Mary Carfax would enjoy relating that: it was a minor scandal, girls of good family might marry German barons or Italian counts, but not Belgians, and certainly not cheesemakers of any sort!

By the time she alighted in Kensington she was composed in her mind and had her story rehearsed in detail. A small boy with a hoop and a stick ran down the pavement past her, and his governess hurried along, calling after him. Zenobia smiled and ascended the steps. She presented her card to the parlormaid, outstared the rather pert girl, and watched with satisfaction as she departed to take the news to her mishtress.

She returned a few moments later and showed Zenobia into the withdrawing room. As she had expected, Mary Carfax’s curiosity was too sharp for her to wait.

“How pleasant to see you again, Miss Gunne, after so very long,” she lied with a chill smile. “Please do take a seat.” Her concern was polite, but there was also a solicitude in it, a reminder that Mary was a fraction younger, which fact she had treasured even in their youth and now found too sweet to let pass. “Would you care for some refreshment? A tisane?”

Zenobia swallowed the reply that came to her lips and forced the opening she had planned. “Thank you; most kind.” She sat on the edge of her chair, as manners dictated, not farther back, as would have been comfortable, and bared her teeth very slightly. “You look well.”

“I daresay it is the climate,” Lady Mary answered pointedly. “So good for the complexion.”

Zenobia, burned by the African sun, longed to make some withering reply but remembered her niece and forbore. “I am sure it must be,” she agreed with difficulty. “All the rain—”

“We have had quite a pleasant winter,” Lady Mary contradicted. “But I daresay you have not been here to experience it?”

Zenobia satisfied her.

“No, no I returned only very recently.”

Lady Mary’s rather straight eyebrows shot up. “And you came to call upon me?”

Zenobia did not twitch a muscle. “I wished to call upon Beatrice Allenby, but I cannot find a trace of her. No one seems to know where she is presently staying. And remembering how fond you were of her, I thought perhaps you might know?”

Lady Mary struggled, and the opportunity to relate a scandal won. “Indeed I do—although I hardly know if I should tell you!” she said with satisfaction.

Zenobia affected surprise and concern. “Oh dear! Some misfortune?”

“That is not the word I would have used for it.”

“Good heavens! You don’t mean a crime?”

“Of course I don’t! Really, your mind is—” Lady Mary caught herself just in time before she was openly rude. That would have been vulgar, and she disliked Zenobia Gunne far too much to be vulgar in front of her. “You have become more used to the unconventional behavior of foreigners. Certainly I do not speak of a crime—rather, a social disaster. She married beneath her and went to live in Belgium.”

“Good gracious!” Zenobia let her amazement register fully. “What an extraordinary thing! Well, there are some very fine cities in Belgium. I daresay she will be happy enough.”

“A cheesemaker!” Lady Mary added.

“A what?”

“A cheesemaker!” She let the word fall with all its redolence of trade. “A person who manufactures cheese!”

Zenobia remembered a dozen such exchanges years ago—and Peter Holland’s face so full of laughter. She knew exactly what he would have thought, what he would have said in a snatched moment alone. She raised her eyebrows. “Are you perfectly sure?”

“Of course I’m sure!” Lady Mary snapped. “It is not the sort of thing about which one makes mistakes!”

“Dear me. Her mother must be distraught!” A very clear picture came into Zenobia’s mind of Beatrice Allenby’s mother, who would have been delighted with any husband, so long as Beatrice did not remain at home.

“Naturally,” Lady Mary agreed. “Wouldn’t anyone? Although she had no one to blame but herself! She did not watch the girl as she should. One has to be vigilant.”

It was the opening Zenobia had been waiting for.

“Of course, your son married very nicely, didn’t he? But men I hear he was a fine-looking young man.” She had not heard anything of the sort, but no mother minded having her son referred to as handsome; in her eyes no doubt he was. There were many photographs round the room, but she was too shortsighted to see them clearly. They could have been of anyone. “And with such charm,” she added for good measure. “So rare. Good-looking young men are apt to be ill-mannered, as if the pleasure of looking at them were sufficient.”

“Yes, indeed,” Lady Mary said with satisfaction. “He could have chosen almost anyone!”

That was a wild exaggeration, but Zenobia let it pass. She recalled how sedate and pompous Gerald Carfax had been, and pictured Mary’s long boredom over the years, the brief dream of love fading at last, buried, because to remember it made the present unbearable.

“Then he married with his heart?” she remarked. “How very commendable. No doubt he is very happy.”

Lady Mary drew breath to declare that certainly he was, then she remembered Etheridge’s murder and realized that would be a highly unfortunate thing to say. “Ah, well ...”

Zenobia waited with the question written large in her face.

“His father-in-law died tragically a very short time ago. He is still in mourning.”

“Oh dear—oh!” Zenobia affected sudden intelligence. “Oh, of course! Vyvyan Etheridge, murdered on Westminster Bridge. How perfectly wretched. Please accept my condolences.”

Lady Mary’s face tightened. “Thank you. For one who has just returned from the outreaches of the Empire you are very well informed. No doubt you have missed Society. I must say, one would have considered oneself safe from such outrages in London, but apparently not! Still, no doubt it will all be solved and forgotten soon. It can have nothing whatsoever to do with us.”

“Naturally,” Zenobia said with difficulty. She remembered acutely why she had disliked Mary Carfax so much. “It is hardly like marrying a cheesemaker.”

Lady Mary was oblivious to sarcasm; it was outside her comprehension. “A great deal depends upon upbringing,” she said serenely. “James would never have done such a selfish and completely irresponsible thing. I would not have permitted him to entertain such an idea when he was young, and of course now he is adult he still respects my wishes.”

And your purse strings, Zenobia thought, but she said nothing.

“Not that he is without spirit!” Lady Mary looked at Zenobia with a flash of dry disapproval that contained the trace of a smile. “He has many fashionable friends and pursuits, and he certainly does not permit his wife to intrude into his ... his pleasures. A woman should keep her place; it is her greatest strength, and her true power. As you would have known, Zenobia, if you had kept it yourself, instead of careering off quite unnecessarily to heathen countries! There is no call for an Englishwoman to go traipsing around on her own, wearing unbecoming clothes and getting in everyone’s way. Adventuring is for men, as are many other pursuits.”

“Otherwise one ends up marrying a cheesemaker instead of an heiress!” Zenobia snapped. “I imagine James’s wife will inherit a fortune now?”

“I have no idea. I do not inquire into my son’s financial affairs.” Lady Mary’s voice was tinged with ice, but there was a curl of satisfaction round her mouth just the same.

“Your daughter-in-law’s affairs,” Zenobia corrected. “Parliament passed an act, you know; a woman’s property is her own now, not her husband’s.”

Lady Mary sniffed, and her smile did not fade. “A woman who loved and trusted her husband would still give it into her husband’s charge,” she replied. “As long as he was alive. As you would know, if you had enjoyed a happy marriage yourself. It is not natural for women to concern themselves in such things. If we once start doing it, Zenobia, then men will cease to look after us as they should! For goodness’ sake, woman, have you no intelligence?”

Zenobia laughed outright. She loathed Mary Carfax and everything to do with her, but for the first time since they had parted thirty-eight years go, she felt a glimmer of understanding toward her, and with it a kind of warmth.

“I fail to see what is funny!” Lady Mary said tartly.

“I’m sure.” Zenobia nodded through her mirth. “You always did.”

Lady Mary reached for the bell. “You must have other calls to make—please do not let me take all of your time.”

There was nothing Zenobia could possibly do but take her leave. She rose. The visit had been a total disaster, not a thing could be salvaged, but she would go with dignity.

“Thank you for passing on the news about Beatrice Allenby. I knew you would be the person who would know what had happened—and who would repeat it. It has been a charming afternoon. Good day to you.” And as the maid opened the door in answer to the bell, she swept past her, across the hall, and out of the front door as soon as it was opened. Outside in the street she swore fluently in a dialect she had learned from a canoeist in the Congo. She had achieved nothing to help Florence Ivory, or Africa Dowell.

Vespasia had by far the easiest task, but she was also the only person suited to perform it with excellence. She knew the political world as neither Charlotte nor Zenobia could possibly do; she had the rank and the reputation to approach almost anyone, and from her many battles for social reform she had gained the experience to know very well when she was being lied to or fobbed off with an edited version of the truth suitable for ladies and amateurs.

She was fortunate to find Somerset Carlisle at home, but had he been out she would have waited. The matter was far too urgent to put off. She had naturally not said so to Zenobia, but the more she heard of the details, the more she feared that at the very least the police could make an excellent case against Florence Ivory, and at most she was actually guilty. Had Zenobia not been the character she was—eccentric, courageous, lonely, and of deep and enduring affections—Vespasia would have avoided any involvement with the affair at all. But since she had agreed to help, the least cruel thing she could think of was that they should try to discover the truth as soon as they could. There was the remote possibility that they would find some other solution; if not, they would at least end Zenobia’s fearful suspense, the swings between the upsurge of hope and the plunges of cold despair as one piece of information surfaced after another. And as hard as any revelation was the gray silence of waiting, not knowing what could happen next, imagining, trying to argue in the mind what the police would be thinking.

Vespasia had experienced it all after George’s death and she knew what Zenobia would feel with an immediacy no outsider could.

Therefore she did not have the slightest qualm in sending for Charlotte and dispatching her on any errand that might prove useful. She would have sent Emily as well had she not been gallivanting round Italy. And she was perfectly happy to take up Somerset Carlisle’s time and employ
his
talents, should they prove to be of help.

He received her in his study. It was a smaller room than the withdrawing room, but immensely comfortable, full of old leather and old finely polished wood reflecting the firelight. The big desk was strewn with papers and open books, and there were three pens in the stand and half a stick of sealing wax and a scatter of unused postage stamps.

Somerset Carlisle was a man in his late forties, lean, with the look of one who has burnt up all his excesses of energy in relentless activity, a face where emotion and irony lay so close to the surface that only years of schooling kept them within the bounds of taste, not because he feared or believed the doctrine of others, but because he knew the impracticality of shocking people. However, as Vespasia knew very well from the past, his imagination was vivid and limitless, and he was equal to any act, no matter how bizarre, if he believed it right.

He was startled to see her, and immediately curious. A lady of her quality would never have called unannounced unless her reason were pressing; knowing Vespasia, it had probably to do with crime or injustice, about which she felt intensely.

He rose as soon as she came in, inadvertently spilling a pile of letters, which he ignored.

“Lady Cumming-Gould! It is always a pleasure to see you. But no doubt you have come for something more than friendship. Please sit down.” He rapidly pushed a great long-legged marmalade cat out of the other chair and brushed off the seat with his hand, plumping up the cushion for her. “Shall I send for tea?”

“Later perhaps,” she replied. “For the moment I need your assistance.”

“Of course. With what?”

The marmalade cat stalked over to the desk, jumped up onto it, and tried to climb behind a pile of books, not in alarm but from curiosity.

“Hamish!” Carlisle said absently. “Get down, you fool!” He turned back to Vespasia, and the cat ignored him. “Something has happened?”

“Indeed it has,” she agreed, remembering with a sharply sweet sense of comfort how much she liked this man. “Two members of Parliament have had their throats cut on Westminster Bridge.”

Carlisle’s winged and rather crooked eyebrows rose. “And that brings you here?”

“No, not of itself, of course not. I am concerned because it seems the niece of a very good friend of mine may be suspected by the police.”

“A woman?” he said incredulously. “Hardly a woman’s sort of crime—neither the method nor the place. Thomas Pitt doesn’t think so, surely?”