Highgate Rise (6 page)

Charlotte smiled sweetly and benignly, and ignoring the questions, opened the parcel, laying aside the wrapping paper neatly, both to tantalize Emily and because it was far too
pretty to tear. She would keep it and use it at Christmas. Inside were three trailing bouquets of handmade silk flowers that were so lush and magnificent she gasped with amazement when she saw them. They would make the most ordinary hat look fit for a duchess, or in the folds of a skirt make a simple taffeta dress into a ball gown. One was in pastel pinks, one blazing reds, and the third all the shades between flamingo and flame.

“Oh, Emily. You’re a genius.” Her mind raced through all the things she could do with them, apart from the sheer pleasure of turning them over and over in her hand and dreaming, which was a joy in itself if she never got any further. “Oh, thank you! They are exquisite.”

Emily was glowing with satisfaction. “I shall bring the paintings of Florence next time. But now I brought Thomas a dozen silk handkerchiefs—with his initials on.”

“He’ll adore them,” Charlotte said with absolute certainty. “Now tell me about your trip—everything you can that isn’t terribly private.” She did not mean to ask Emily if she were happy, nor would she have. Marrying Jack Radley had been a wild and very personal decision. He had no money and no prospects; after George Ashworth, who had had both, and a title as well, it was a radical social change. And she had certainly loved George and felt his death profoundly. Yet Jack, whose reputation was dubious, had proved that his charm was not nearly as shallow as it appeared at first. He was a loyal friend, with courage as well as humor and imagination, and was prepared to take risks in a cause he believed right.

“Put on the kettle,” Emily ordered. “And have you got pastry baking?” She sniffed. “It smells delicious.”

Charlotte obeyed, and then settled to listen.

Emily had written regularly, except for the last few weeks, which had been spent at sea on the long, late-summer voyage home from Naples to London. They had sailed slowly by intent, calling at many ports, but she had not mailed letters, believing they would not reach Charlotte before she did herself. Now the words poured out in descriptions of Sardinia,
the Balearic Isles, North Africa, Gibraltar, Portugal, northern Spain and the Atlantic coast of France.

To Charlotte they were magical places, immeasurably distant from Bloomsbury and the busy streets of London, housework and domestic duties, children, and Pitt’s recounting of his day. She would never see them, and half of her regretted it and would love to have watched the brilliant light on colored walls, smelled the spice and fruit and dust in the air, felt the heat and heard the different rhythm of foreign tongues. They would have filled her imagination and enriched her memory for years. But she could have the best of them through Emily’s recounting, and do it without the seasickness, the weariness of long cramped coach rides, highly irregular sanitation and a wide variety of insects which Emily described in repulsive detail.

Through it all there emerged a sharper, kinder and less romantic picture of Jack, and Charlotte found many of her anxieties slipping away.

“Now that you’re home, are you going to stay in the city?” she asked, looking at Emily’s face, flushed with color from sun and wind but tired around the eyes. “Or are you going to the country?” She had inherited a large house in its own parklands, in trust for her son from her marriage to Lord Ashworth.

“Oh, no,” Emily said quickly. “At least—” She made a small, rueful face. “I don’t know. It’s very different now we’re not on a planned journey with something new to see or to do each day, and somewhere we have to be by nightfall. This is the beginning of real life.” She looked down at her hands, small and strong and unlined on the table. “I’m a little frightened in case suddenly we’re not sure what to say to each other—or even what to do to fill the day. It’s going to be so different. There isn’t any crisis anymore.” She sniffed rather elegantly and smiled directly at Charlotte. “Before we were married there was always some terrible event pressing us to act—first George’s death, and then the murders in Hanover Close.” She raised her fair eyebrows hopefully and her blue eyes were wide, but they knew each other far too well
for even Emily to feign innocence. “I don’t suppose Thomas has a case we could help with?”

Charlotte burst into laughter, even though she knew Emily was serious and that all the past cases in which they had played a part were fraught with tragedy, and some danger as well as any sense of adventure there may have been.

“No. There was a very terrible case while you were away.”

“You didn’t tell me!” Emily’s expression was full of accusation and incredulity. “What? What sort of case? Why didn’t you write to me about it?”

“Because you would have been too worried to enjoy your honeymoon, and I wanted you to have a perfect time seeing all the glories of Paris and Italy, not thinking about people having their throats cut in a London fog,” Charlotte answered honestly. “But I will certainly tell you now, if you wish.”

“Of course I wish! But first get me some more tea.”

“We could have luncheon,” Charlotte suggested. “I have cold meat and fresh pickle—will that do?”

“Very well—but talk while you’re getting it,” Emily instructed. She did not offer to help; they had both been raised to expect marriage to gentlemen of their own social status who would provide them with homes and suitable domestic servants for all house and kitchen labor. Charlotte had married dreadfully beneath herself—to a policeman—and learned to do her own work. Emily had married equally far above herself, to an aristocrat with a fortune, and she had not even been
in
a kitchen in years, except Charlotte’s; and although she knew how to approve or disapprove a menu for anyone from a country squire to the Queen herself, she had no idea, and no wish for one, as to how it should be made.

“Have you been to see Great-Aunt Vespasia yet?” Charlotte asked as she carved the meat.

Great-Aunt Vespasia was actually George’s aunt, and no immediate relative to either of them, but they had both learned to love and admire her more deeply than any of their own family. She had been one of the great beauties of her generation. Now she was close to eighty, and with wealth
and social position assured she had both the power and the indifference to opinion to conduct herself as she pleased, to espouse every cause her conscience dictated or her sympathies called for. She dressed in the height of fashion, and could charm the prime minister, or the dustman—or freeze them both at twenty paces with a look of ice.

“No,” Emily replied. “I thought of going this afternoon. Does Aunt Vespasia know about this case?”

Charlotte smiled smugly. “Oh yes. She was involved. In fact she lent me her carriage and footman for the final confrontation—” She let it hang in the air deliberately.

Emily glared at her.

Blithely Charlotte refilled the kettle and turned to the cupboard to find the pickle. She even thought of humming a little tune, but decided against it on the ground that she could not sing very well—and Emily could.

Emily began to drum her fingers on the scrubbed-clean wooden tabletop.

“A member of Parliament was found lashed to a lamppost on Westminster Bridge….” Charlotte began to recount the whole story, at first with relish, then with awe, and finally with horror and pity. When she had finished the meal was done and it was early afternoon.

Emily said very little, reaching her hands across the table to clasp Charlotte’s arm with her fingers. “You could have been killed!” she said angrily, but there were tears in her eyes. “You must never do such a mad thing again! I suppose whatever I think of to say to you, Thomas will already have said it? I trust he scolded you to within an inch of your life?”

“It was not necessary,” Charlotte said honestly. “I was quite aware of it all myself. Are you ready to go and see Aunt Vespasia?”

“Certainly. But you are not. You must change out of that very plain stuff dress and put on something more appealing.”

“To do the ironing?”

“Nonsense. You are coming with me. It will do you good. It is a lovely day and the drive will be excellent.”

Charlotte gave duty a brief thought, then submitted to temptation.

“Yes—if you wish. It will only take me a few moments to change. Gracie!” And she hurried out to find the maid and request her to prepare the children’s tea for their return and peel the vegetables for the main evening meal.

Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould lived in a spacious, fashionable house, and her door was opened by a maid in a crisp uniform with lace-trimmed cap and apron. She recognized Charlotte and Emily immediately and showed them in without the usual formalities of prevarication. There was no question as to whether they would be received. Her ladyship was not only very fond of them both, she was also acutely bored with the chatter of society and the endless minutiae of etiquette.

Vespasia was sitting in her private withdrawing room, very sparsely furnished by current standards of taste—no heavy oak tables, no overstuffed sofas and no fringes on the curtains. Instead it was reminiscent of a far earlier age, when Vespasia herself was born, the high empire of Napoleon Bonaparte, before the Battle of Waterloo, the clean lines of the Georgian era and the austerity of a long, desperate war for survival. One of her uncles had died in Nelson’s navy at Trafalgar. Now even the Iron Duke was dead and Wellington a name in history books, and those who fought in the Crimea forty years later were old men now.

Vespasia was sitting upright on a hard-backed Chippendale chair, her dove-gray gown high at the neck, touched with French lace, and four ropes of pearls hanging almost to her waist. She did not bother with the pretense of indifference. Her smile was full of delight.

“Emily, my dear. How very well you look. I’m so pleased you have come. You shall tell me everything you enjoyed. The tedious parts you may omit, no doubt they were just the same as when I was there and it is quite unnecessary that any of us should endure them again. Charlotte, you will live through it all a second time and ask all the pertinent questions. Come, sit down.”

They both went to her, kissed her in turn, then took the places she indicated.

“Agatha,” she commanded the maid. “You will bring tea. Cucumber sandwiches, if you please—and then have Cook make some fresh scones with—I think—raspberry jam, and of course cream.”

“Yes, my lady.” Agatha nodded obediently.

“In an hour and a half,” Vespasia added. “We have much to hear.”

Whether they would stay so long was not open to argument, nor if any other chance caller should be admitted. Lady Vespasia was not at home to anyone else.

“You may begin,” Vespasia said, her eyes bright with a mixture of anticipation and laughter.

Nearly two hours later the tea table was empty and Emily finally could think of nothing else whatever to add.

“And now what are you going to do?” Vespasia inquired with interest.

Emily looked down at the carpet. “I don’t know. I suppose I could become involved in good works of some sort. I could be patron of the local committee for the care of fallen women!”

“I doubt it,” Charlotte said dryly. “You are not Lady Ashworth anymore. You’d have to be an ordinary member.”

Emily made a face at her. “I have no intention of becoming either. I don’t mind the fallen women—it’s the committee members I cannot abide. I want a proper cause, something to do better than pontificate on the state of others. You never did answer me properly when I asked you what Thomas was doing at the moment.”

“Indeed.” Vespasia looked at Charlotte hopefully also. “What is he doing? I trust he is not in Whitechapel? The newspapers are being very critical of the police at the moment. Last year they were loud in their praises, and all blame went to the mobs in Trafalgar Square in the riots. Now the boot is on the other foot, and they are calling for Sir Charles Warren’s resignation.”

Emily shivered. “I imagine they are frightened—I think I
should be if I lived in that sort of area. They criticize everyone—even the Queen. People are saying she does not appear enough, and the Prince of Wales is far too light-minded and spends too much money. And of course the Duke of Clarence behaves like an ass—but if his father lives as long as the Queen, poor Clarence will be in a bath chair before he sees the throne.”

“That is not a satisfactory excuse.” Vespasia’s lips moved in the tiniest smile, then she turned to Charlotte again. “You have not told us if Thomas is working on this Whitechapel affair.”

“No. He is in Highgate, but I know very little about the case,” Charlotte confessed. “In fact it has only just begun—”

“The very best place for us to become acquainted with it,” Emily said, her enthusiasm returning. “What is it?”

Charlotte looked at their expectant faces and wished she had more to tell.

“It was a fire,” she said bleakly. “A house was burned and a woman died in it. Her husband was out on a medical call—he is a doctor—and the servants’ wing was the last to be damaged and they were all rescued.”

“Is that all?” Emily was obviously disappointed.

“I told you it was only the very beginning,” Charlotte apologized. “Thomas came home reeking of smoke and with fine ash in his clothes. He looked drained of all energy and terribly sad. She was supposed to have gone out, but it was canceled at the last moment.”

“So it should have been the husband who was at home,” Vespasia concluded. “I assume it was arson, or Thomas would not have been called. Was the intended victim the husband—or was it he who set the fire?”

“It would seem that he was the intended victim,” Charlotte agreed. “With the best will in the world, I cannot see any way in which we could”—she smiled with a touch of self-mockery —“meddle.”

“Who was she?” Emily asked quietly. “Do you know anything about her?”

“No, nothing at all, except that people spoke well of her. But then they usually do of the dead. It is expected, even required.”

“That sounds totally vacuous,” Vespasia said wearily. “And tells neither Thomas nor us anything about her at all-only that her friends are conventional. What was her name?”