Chapter 12
B
ut if there was one thing with which Arabella was thoroughly familiar, it was her own city, and she knew that, wherever she might emerge from this labyrinth, she was almost certain of finding her way home again. So being lost beneath the streets was not a frightening prospect for her. What
was
frightening was the possibility of stumbling onto a nest of thieves or worse.
She noticed as she walked that the acoustics were strange down here. Take that drip from the ceiling, for example; Arabella could see by the light of her lantern that it was splashing into a pool, and that both were located on the other side of a vast open space. Yet it sounded as though it were mere inches away, and on her right, rather than her left. Then there was that low, uneven murmur, doubtless a subterranean stream, that sounded uncannily like distant voices. Where was that coming from? No stream was visible anywhere, but the farther she went, the more human it sounded. And then suddenly she caught the words: “See whether you can find any . . .”
Arabella blew out her candle and stood perfectly still. She was hoping to escape detection in the dark, and also trying to establish the location of the voices without the added distraction of her eyesight. In the darkness, though, her mind was only too ready to paint pictures for her: Now she was being flayed alive . . . now turned on a spit, like a capon . . . now cut up into pieces, roasted on sticks and eaten with pickled onions, as a kind of ploughman’s lunch. Rape scenarios never even entered her head, for Arabella was thoroughly frightened by this time, and beyond the reach of more diverting possibilities.
The voices seemed to issue from somewhere to her right. So she would turn down this tunnel here, on the left, and distance herself from them as swiftly as she—
With a smack and a grunt, Arabella ran straight into a man holding a dark lantern, nearly knocking it from his hand. And just before she fainted dead away, she had a single, instantaneous impression of half a dozen desperadoes, crouched in a circle round the lantern holder, all staring at her in astonishment. Then followed a pleasant period of unconsciousness, devoid of all fear and discomfort. But it didn’t last.
“Arabella! Miss Beaumont! Can you hear me?”
She came woozily to her senses to find herself stretched at full length upon the ground, lying on a man’s coat. The next instant she was sitting up, half-embraced by Someone’s strong, supporting arm.
“Here,” said Someone, pressing a cup to her lips. “Drink this. You’ll feel better shortly.” The voice was familiar.
“What’s happening?” she asked, drinking the brandy.
“You fainted. From fear, I shouldn’t wonder. What on Earth are you doing down here?”
Arabella craned her neck round to look at her nurse.
“Elliot!” she cried, with mingled joy and relief. It was the friend she had met aboard the
Perseverance
the previous year, one of the people who had been so helpful in procuring her Pan statue. She didn’t know these other fellows, who were grouped around them, looking concerned, but she concluded that they were not dangerous. This conviction was based in part upon their gentlemanlike appearance and demeanor, but chiefly upon their weapons, for rather than pistols, knives, and cudgels, they brandished compasses, engineering transits, measuring tapes, and collecting sacks.
When Arabella had recovered, Mr. Elliot assisted her to her feet.
“I am delighted to see you again,” he said, “but I regret that I am unable to converse just now, as my work here is of the utmost urgency. However, if you should be free tomorrow night, perhaps we might meet for supper. And then we can tell each other what we were doing in this place.”
“I shall very much look forward to it, Elliot. Will eight o’clock suit you?”
“The question is, will it suit
you,
” he replied. “Evidently it does. Excellent! I’ll call for you at eight. I only regret that our present encounter must be so brief.”
“Where, exactly, am I?” she asked.
“Directly beneath Green Park. Permit me to escort you to the nearest exit.”
Cecil Elliot had the most exquisite manners. It was what Arabella liked best about him. Or at least, it was one of the things. When he had shewn her the way out, he said, very quietly, “May I see you tonight? It may not be possible for me to get away, but if it is, I could be there round midnight. Would that be convenient?”
“Of course, Elliot,” she murmured. “I shall be quite alone.”
Well-born ladies of the
ton
generally spent their days paying social calls, or being called upon in their turn by other well-born ladies. It was a tedious business in Arabella’s opinion, and sometimes she wondered in her idle moments whether the system hadn’t been thought up by men, in order to keep women from making important scientific discoveries or developing new mathematical theories or contributing in a general but substantial manner to the betterment of man- (and woman- ) kind.
In her
idle
moments, reader. But Arabella had not got many of those. For whereas less fortunate ladies were compelled to call on one another to no purpose,
she
had been barred from this pointless activity by virtue of her lack of same. It therefore behooved her to demonstrate her gratitude by putting her free time to good use. Just now, for instance, she was writing a novel.
It was a scurrilous piece of work, full of villains and stabbings and cloaked figures stealing down crooked stairways at the bottom of streets, and Arabella wrote furiously for a couple of hours. But in the end, her fingers cramped up, and she slumped back in her chair, turban askew, surrounded by the scattered pages of her first draft, and wishing for an uncritical audience to hear her fresh pages. Bunny had heard her the last time, when Palomina Breasted, Arabella’s heroine, had found herself cornered in the deserted caravanserai:
The wicked Prefecture of Police was about to seize her, when, to his utter surprise and extreme vexation, Palomina withdrew a pistol from her muff and pointed it at him.
“You must be mad!” he cried.
“Perhaps! But you are obviously a dullard, sir. Because it is sheer stupidity to antagonize the person who is holding you at gunpoint. Allow me to demonstrate!”
She fired straight at his heart.
“You see?” she said, addressing only herself now, as there was no longer anyone else present to hear her. “Given a choice, I should take insanity over idiocy every time!”
And she stepped lightly over the body, dropping the firearm onto a conveniently situated refuse pile.
Bunny had said she liked it, but added that it was not likely to go over well.
“Why not?” Arabella had asked.
“Because it’s not what people are used to, and that is what they like. Now, if you were to change ‘Palomina’ to ‘Paolo,’ say . . .”
“Never! Most of my best lines are gender-based!”
“You’re a good writer, Bell. Why not write about real situations?”
“Such as . . . ?”
“Such as your detecting adventures.”
“Don’t be silly, Bunny! Nobody wants to read detective stories! Your judgment has undoubtedly been compromised by this,” she said, picking up the book Belinda had just been reading. “
Pride and Prejudice
!”
“There is no detection in that. Anyway, I got it from the lending library, and it is very good! Have you read it?”
“Yes,” said Arabella, curtly. “And I suppose you prefer her work to mine.”
Belinda said nothing.
“This author,” said Arabella, “who signs herself ‘A Lady,’ is too timid to use her own name. And her novels, whilst the writing is tolerably good, deal with well-behaved little ladies who stay at home and wait for men to come by and discover them. Wouldn’t you prefer an independent heroine like Palomina, who doesn’t need to form an attachment to a man? A woman who is not afraid of anything? Who travels to exotic lands and knows how to handle firearms?”
Belinda persisted in maintaining her silence.
“Well,
I
do!” huffed Arabella. “Evidently, I am ahead of my time!”
She smiled now, to recall the scene. Oh, how she missed Belinda! Thankfully, Cecil Elliot would soon arrive to help divert her sad thoughts from the people she missed. After all, Cecil would actually be present, unlike Bunny and Mr. Kendrick, and a popular maxim holds that a bird . . . or some other thing . . . in the hand is worth two in the bush. Still, Arabella thought, a certain
type
of barnyard bird, in a certain
type
of bush, was better than any number of other possibilities. She was by now convinced that she should never see Mr. Kendrick more, and concluded on that account that the healthiest thing she could do was to forget him completely the moment Mr. Elliot arrived with his bird.
She would receive Cecil in her boudoir, which was properly neutral. That is, it contained neither bed nor bathtub, yet still hinted at intimacy via its close quarters and sumptuous appointments. By half-past eleven, the pink porcelain stove was glowing like a satisfied lover, and the plump cushions on the boudoir divan were most friendly and suggestive. Arabella looked tempting, yet sophisticated, in a semi-transparent peignoir that seemed fabricated from early morning mist. She pulled the neckline a little lower, and was fluffing the ruffles clinging thereto, when Doyle appeared in the doorway.
“Someone to see you, miss,” said the chambermaid, “but don’t be gettin’ yer hopes up, now, for ’tis not the party you’re thinkin’ it is.”
“Dear God!” cried her mistress. “I thought Glen
deen
was still at sea!”
Arabella and the duke had a tacit understanding about entertaining other friends while separated, but in sudden and unforeseen circumstances, reactions were apt to be unpredictable.
Doyle hastened to reassure her. “No fear; ’tis only Miss Worthington. But she won’t be put off, and insists on seein’ ye, right away!”
“Constance?”
“No, miss, if you please. She says we must call her ‘Costanze’ now.”
“What on Earth does she want at this hour?”
“Is it me yer askin’? Oy’ve nivver known why that eejit does half the t’ings she does, and I doubt whether she could tell ye, either!”
Mistress and maid repaired to the dressing room, to search for a suitable dressing gown. “Very well, Doyle,” said Arabella, after covering up in a robe of heavy, salmon-colored satin. “Ask her up to the boudoir.”
A moment later, Costanze burst through the door like a cannonball in purple feathers. Having begun her soliloquy on the staircase, she merely kept going, never minding that her audience had missed out on the beginning.
“. . . fate you know so it wasn’t
my
fault but whatever am I to do now?”
“Costanze, stop. I have not the faintest notion of what you are talking about.”
The-woman-who-now-called-herself-Costanze ceased talking and goggled at Arabella, as though her eyes would burst from her head.
“Breathe, Costanze,” said Arabella.
The visitor gulped in a double lungful of air and continued to goggle.
“Again, Costanze. Don’t stop. Keep breathing again and again and again. Never stop, in fact.”
The visitor obeyed. Then she began to hiccup, and Arabella poured her out a tumbler of water.
“Here,” she said. “Now, I want you to relax, yes? And think back to the beginning of your problem. You do have a problem, do you not? Isn’t that why you have come here at this inconvenient hour?”
Costanze nodded, and because she was trying to drink from the tumbler at the same time, spilled a quantity of it onto her feathered cloak, and swore a blue streak, as they say.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” cried Arabella, quite at the end of her patience.
“Will
you get on with it?”
“It is Lady Ribbonhat!” gasped the other, at last. “She is going all over town performing good deeds so that she’ll get into heaven despite the fact that she’s been utterly horrid for so long and she decided to give some of her old hats to me but they were all smudged and greasy and most all the plumes were broken and I didn’t want them so I really don’t see how she expects to get into paradise on the strength of that do you?”
“Is that what you’ve come to tell me?”
“No that is only the pry-and-bull honestly Bell sometimes you can be so obtuse anyway she sent the hats over with her footman you see.”
“Not with Harry?”
“Yes with Harry so there he was on my doorstep again and Pigeon was away dining with Lord Melbourne I think it was in Cheapside or no that was that other time so I suppose he must have been dining with his grandmama if it was a Thursday, because Pigeon always dines with family on Thursdays but now I think of it I could have sworn the Lord Melbourne dinner was on a Thursday—do you suppose they are related?”
“No. And either it wasn’t Lord Melbourne or it wasn’t Cheapside, because you would never find the one in the other. It’s too preposterous.”
“Well anyway Pigeon was away somewhere and one thing led to another and it was just like the last time except for the hats I mean and so we started up again and I’m being blackmailed again only this time I know who it is—it is Madame Zhenay because she said I was to tell you that you’ll never see a penny of the money I owe you.”
“Wait,” said Arabella. “This is not making sense. How does she propose to blackmail you? The woman has no proof.”
“Yes she does—she has my letters to Harry.”
“No she doesn’t, Costanze.
I
have those letters, remember?”
“You have the old ones but she has the new ones!”
“What! Are you telling me that you have written to him,
again?!
”
“Yes Bell I just said that!”