One Touch of Scandal (34 page)

“The swan again?” Grace felt her eyes widen with
horror. “Anisha, th-this doesn't have anything to do with
jyotish
now, does it?”

“Never mind that,” said Anisha impatiently. “The swan, Grace. What might it mean?”

“It means nothing, Anisha, I swear it! They are big, white birds with nasty tempers. I know nothing else about them.”

“The evil manifests itself in the sign of the swan, and in the number thirty-five.” Anisha frowned intently. “These are very bad omens, and much associated with the enmity directed toward you, Grace. I beg you will give it careful thought.”

Then Anisha released her hands, her mind still obviously turned inward. Grace blinked and straightened up in her chair. To her shock, a galleried silver tray sat at her elbow, the teapot and service laid out upon it.

On impulse, she touched the pot. It was merely warm.

Good Lord.

She looked at Anisha, who appeared wan and pale. “You look tired,” she said. “Shall I pour?”

Anisha bestirred herself to glance at the pot. “Oh. Yes, thank you.”

“Anisha,” she said as she tipped the cup full, “may I ask you a question?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“A moment ago you said
others,
” she replied, passing the cup across the table. “That envy was directed
at others.
Whom did you mean?”

Anisha looked at her with that dark, steady stare, putting Grace very much in mind of her elder brother. “There is evil all around you, Grace,” she said quietly. “Raju's fear is well-founded.”

“But Anisha, mightn't you be mistaken?” Grace pro
tested. “After all, if I had even a hint of the Gift, you could not read me?”

“I do not read,” said Anisha almost hollowly. “My skills are not those of the Gift. They are…different. But even the Vateis can feel emotion—sometimes even emotion directed
in
as well as radiated out.”

Grace felt suddenly uneasy. For so long she had allowed herself to discount Adrian's fears for her safety because it seemed the only way to go on. But in doing so, had she unwittingly brought danger into his home?

“Anisha, could any of this be a threat to you?” she asked. “To the
children
? Tell me, for God's sake.”

“The evil is not here.” Anisha spoke as if her life's blood had drained away. “I can say to you only what I have seen, Grace. Never have I seen such a seemingly pointless thing so clearly. It must mean something.”

Grace just shook her head. “I can think of nothing.”

As if frustrated, Anisha snatched up Teddy's slate. “
Thirty-five,
” she said determinedly, “and
Swan
.” She wrote it out with swift, hard clacks of the chalk, then flipped the board around. “
Think
, Grace, for God's sake.”

Grace couldn't get her breath. Her eyes widened, her hands clutching at the table.

“What?” Anisha demanded.

Grace inhaled raggedly. “Anisha, it's Thirty-Five Swan
Lane
,” she whispered. “It's Crane and Holding. It's the address of
Josiah Crane's office
.”

Anisha's eyes widened. “Good Lord!” she uttered, letting the slate clatter onto the table. “The disinherited cousin?”

“Yes, yes.” Grace set a hand to her mouth. “
Mon Dieu!
It's just as Adrian said—and I refused to believe him! Josiah was deeply in debt. He needed money, and Ethan beggared him by tying up their cash reserves.”

Again, Anisha's perfect eyebrows snapped together. “But this helps him how?” she asked. “He inherits nothing. This was no killing done out of rage. He planned it. Why?”

The sick feeling in Grace's stomach swamped her. She remembered again Adrian's horrific vision of Fenella's death.

“
Mon Dieu!
” she whispered again. “I think Josiah Crane means to marry Fenella—or try to. Aunt Abigail says that in England, a woman's property conveys straight to her husband unless her father sets it aside. And if that should happen, Josiah will own everything.”

“Will she have him?” asked Anisha. “Surely she would not be fool enough?”

Grace shook her head. “No, she
won't
have him,” she whispered. “I'm sure of it. But how will he react, Anisha, if she says as much? What then might he do?”

“God only knows,” said Anisha.

“We should send word to Scotland Yard.”

“And tell them what?” said Anisha, her voice unsteady. “That Mad Ruthveyn's half-caste sister is having visions, too? No, Grace, we've no proof. I think we'd best send for Rance. He'll know what to do about this murderous devil until Raju returns.”

“Yes, yes, that's it.” Grace shoved back her chair. “Rance will know, won't he? As to me, Anisha, I think it is time I did what I should have done days ago. Indeed, I am ashamed of myself for being such a coward.”

Anisha's chin came up. “What are you going to do?”

“I am going to Fenella's,” she said. “And I am going to convince her of my innocence. Moreover, I will make her see—in some roundabout way—that she must step carefully around Josiah.”

“Can you?”

“I have to try,” Grace whispered. “If he has proposed marriage under the guise of protecting her or taking care of her, or any such nonsense, I shall suggest she delay, but under no condition to refuse him.”

“No, no,” Anisha whispered. “She mustn't. If he's mad enough to do murder, her refusal might send him into a rage.”

“And I could not bear another woman hurt under such circumstances,” said Grace, her face crumpling a little. “Not when I could have spoken a few words, perhaps, and stopped it.”

Anisha winced. “You are thinking, are you not, of that poor girl the major killed,” she murmured, reaching for her hand. “But Grace, that was not your fault. Nor is this. Josiah Crane merely used you to take the blame for his deed.”

“Whatever happened, I can think only of Fenella now. I should have done so sooner.” Grace took both Anisha's hands and squeezed them hard. “You go run Rance to ground. I shall call upon Fenella, and I will not let her turn me away. Wish me luck.”

“I do.” Anisha smiled wanly, then kissed Grace on the cheek. “Good luck.”

T
he rhythmic
clack-clack-clack
of the train slowing on the tracks almost drowned out Royden Napier's hiss of displeasure.

“But this is Boxmoor Station!” he said, frowning up at the Marquess of Ruthveyn and snapping his newspaper shut. “Why the devil get off at Boxmoor?”

Ruthveyn stood, one hand braced on the door of their first-class compartment. “This was a mistake,” he said over the slowing engine. “We have to go back.”

“Back
to Euston?” Napier cursed beneath his breath. “You came all the way to Whitehall yesterday to demand I roll out before dawn to accompany you on this
utterly essential
journey—your words, sir, not mine—and now you want to get off, turn round, and go home again?”

“Only briefly,” said Ruthveyn. “We'll set off again in the morning.”

“Oh, well pardon me!” Napier rammed the newspaper into his valise. “That's all perfectly clear now.”

“With Mademoiselle Gauthier,” Ruthveyn added. “We should have brought her to begin with. I wasn't thinking.”

“And now you are? God save us!” Napier grabbed the back of the seat and hoisted himself against the lug of the slowing carriage. “I'm getting off, all right. But I'll not be coming back again, Ruthveyn—nor will my valise full of documents. If you wish Lord Bessett's involvement in this great goose chase of yours, you can bloody well fetch him down to Whitehall.”

“We should have brought her along,” Ruthveyn repeated, having listened to Napier's invective with but half an ear. “I shouldn't have left her alone, Napier. Moreover, she might be of help to Bessett. She might…I don't know. She should have come, that is all.”

“And how would that look to the rarefied citizens of Belgravia?” Napier demanded. “My haring off to Yorkshire with the prime suspect in tow? Somehow I do not think Sir George's political headaches would be much mitigated by that.”

The train had stopped, and up and down the line, doors were slamming amidst the porters' cries. Ruthveyn snatched his own valise from the rack, shoved open the door, and alit, never looking back at Napier.

“Ruthveyn,” he shouted after him. “I bloody well mean it! If you're going to Yorkshire with me, this is your last chance.”

But the marquess had paced off a straight line to the ticket agent's window.

“Two please,” he ordered, “on the next train to London.”

 

The massive white mansion in Belgrave Square looked somehow colder than she remembered it, Grace thought, stepping down onto the pavement. With a few words of thanks, she pressed the fare into the jarvey's hand.

He squinted down from the box. “D'ye wish me to wait, miss?”

One hand on her hat, Grace cast her eyes up at the gray skies. “Yes, if you don't mind,” she said. “Just turn down Halkin Street. I might be half an hour.”

“Aye, miss.”

He touched his whip to his hat brim, then the carriage clopped away, leaving Grace alone in the colorless square. Already the trees were losing their foliage, and the grass was fading to a wintry shade of green. Feeling small against all the grandeur, Grace pulled her cloak snug and went up to ring the bell.

She was rewarded by a familiar face. “Trenton!” she cried. “How lovely to see you. Might I come in?”

The old butler looked wary and a little wan, but he smiled all the same. “Mademoiselle,” he replied, finally holding the door wide. “It has been some weeks.”

Grace had begun to tug off her gloves. “I have missed you all terribly,” she said. “How is Miss Crane? Will you tell her I've come to call?”

“My pleasure, miss,” he said, but he looked a little pained. “Will you wait in the small parlor?”

“Certainly,” she said, turning to follow.

It was then that she noticed the faint smell of solvent. Inside the small parlor, the gold jacquard wallpaper had been stripped away, and the walls were now painted ivory. Above, the gold medallion had been removed from the ceiling and the gilt pier glasses taken down, giving the entire room an almost restrained look.

“Fenella is fitting out the room all afresh, I see,” she
said, handing her cloak and gloves to Trenton. “I confess, I like it rather better.”

“Miss Crane thought it ostentatious,” Trenton confessed. “I don't believe she ever liked it.”

“And Tess cannot have mourned the passing of those mirrors,” said Grace, smiling. “It seemed she spent half the morning polishing them.”

Trenton's face fell. “I regret to say Tess is no longer with us, miss,” he replied. “Indeed, much of the staff has been let go.”

“Let go?” Grace was shocked.

“I fear so. Miss Crane said that as she did not mean to entertain, and the children were now gone, the new staff weren't needed.”

“The new staff?” Grace paced farther into the room. “What new staff?

“The staff hired since Mrs. Crane's time,” said Trenton behind her. “The
last
Mrs. Crane, I should say.”

Grace spun around, still holding her gloves. “Do you mean Ethan's mother?” She looked at him curiously. “But that was eons ago. Who would be left?”

“Just three of us, miss,” said Trenton a little mournfully. “Indeed, I think that more recently Miss Crane has decided to let the house go and remove entirely.”

“Remove? Remove to where?” But Grace knew the answer to that question as soon as it left her lips.

“Back to Rotherhithe,” said Trenton. “I am not sure precisely where. She says she misses it, and—oh, but there! One mustn't carry gossip. Let me see if Miss Crane is in. I am not…perfectly sure.”

On a rising swell of panic, Grace realized she had very nearly come too late. Fenella must mean to marry and move into Josiah Crane's house. It was the only thing that made sense.

Grace hastened after him. “Trenton.” She settled a hand on his frail arm. “I
must
see Fenella. I cannot tell you how important it is. Do not let her suppose things that…well, that simply are not true. Do not let her turn me away, please. I beg you. Tell her—why, tell her I said I shan't leave until she sees me.”

“Yes, miss.” But he looked unconvinced.

Grace felt suddenly unwell again. It was the smell, she thought. “Trenton,” she said before he left the room, “might I wait in the sitting room? I think the smell of paint is turning my stomach.”

For an instant, he hesitated. Then a hint of sympathy passed over his face. “Certainly, miss.” He gave a little bow. “Just show yourself up.”

As the elderly butler vanished into the nether regions of the house, Grace crossed the grand marble foyer and went up the broad, semicircular staircase to the upper landing. Here she paused to look around, one hand sliding along on the balustrade as she paced from one end to the other.

It felt positively eerie. The last time she had been up here, Ethan had lain dead in his study across the corridor, and she had stood weak-kneed against the sitting-room wall, oblivious to the policemen and servants surging around her. But that awful night, thank God, now seemed a lifetime away.

Grace turned and paced back toward the sitting room, suddenly wishing she had the gift of sensing emotion as Anisha and Adrian did. Surely this house surged with unseen anger—all of it directed at Fenella now. And the poor woman was walking into the teeth of it, unawares.

The sitting-room door stood open as it always did. Grace strolled inside only to find that it, too, was in disarray. All the paintings were down, and a set of scaffolding stood in one corner, as if this room was soon to be
painted, too. Mr. Holding's favorite chair was gone, along with the glass cabinet containing his display of stuffed game birds—a thing Grace had always found vaguely loathsome.

Too restless to sit, Grace removed her hat and laid it on the tea table with her gloves, then began to wander the room. How foreign it all seemed to her now, with the landscapes down and everything seemingly upturned. And though she could not disagree with the changes Fenella was making, it struck her as odd that such a thing should be done so shortly after Mr. Holding's death. It seemed…a little disrespectful, perhaps.

In the back of the room, the scaffolding stood like a bare tree against a wintry sky, but not quite against the wall, as if it were in the process of being moved. Curious, Grace peeked round it.

The large gilt-framed portrait that had hung over the fireplace was tucked behind it, propped against the wall in the shadows. But it looked strange, somehow. Absently, Grace tipped it forward with one finger, and was instantly horrified. The sitter's face had been slashed by two long strokes down the middle, and a third cutting all the way across, leaving pieces of canvas to flop impotently. On a gasp, Grace tipped it back again.

But now the cuts were obvious to her. What in God's name could have possessed someone? What depth of hatred could drive someone to do such damage to an inanimate object?

The portrait, she recalled, was of Ethan's mother in her youth. Mrs. Crane had been a lovely young widow when she had married into the Crane dynasty, and never had Grace heard an ill word spoken of her. Indeed, by all accounts she had been a fine woman, proud of her family and her domestic accomplishments.

But someone had clearly hated her.

Someone had hated Mrs. Holding enough to slice her face nearly to ribbons. Grace caught her hands together and tried not to wring them. Something just was not right. The work being done in the house went beyond renovation or removal. And why renovate at all if one meant to go? And why slash an old and meaningless portrait to bits?

Unless it held some meaning that others could not so readily see.

On impulse, Grace went to the mahogany secretary opposite the hearth and slid open the top drawer, her hand suddenly shaking. The wooden tray that had always held a supply of Ethan's personal stationery was empty now. But the left-hand tray still held a thick, creamy pile of Fenella's monogrammed letter paper.

Grace pushed the drawer shut with her fingertips, a cold, ugly suspicion running like a shiver up her spine. Good Lord. How many evenings, she wondered, had they all sat here together, quietly reading or playing whist after dinner: Ethan, Fenella, Josiah, and she? And how many letters had Fenella written, seated at that very desk?

Ethan's study was just across the passageway. Grace had spent little time there, but she knew without looking that had she ever pulled open his top drawer, she would have seen a tidy stack of Crane and Holding letterhead to one side and Ethan's personal stationery on the other, the latter lightly used.

The second stack—
this
stack—had always been kept here for Fenella's convenience. Because Ethan both craved society's approval and yet feared its disdain. Because he felt awkward and unpolished, and left the handling of all things social to his sister. The sister who wasn't his sister at all, but his stepfather's daughter.

For reasons she could not explain, Grace went back to Mrs. Holding's portrait and knelt to one side to better look at it. Ethan's laughing gray eyes looked steadily back at her—albeit from separate bits of canvas now. Nausea churned in her stomach, and she set her bloodless fingertips to her lips.

Just then, there was a faint sound. Grace rose and turned to see Fenella on the threshold, still attired in deepest mourning, a jet brooch at her throat and tiny jet earbobs quivering upon her earlobes.

Fenella's hands, too, were caught before her. But she looked oddly bloated—almost matronly—and her heavy auburn hair was in disarray, which was most unlike her.

“Grace,” she said, little warmth in her tone. “This is most unexpected. I am not at all sure you ought to be here.”

Something like anger swelled in Grace's chest. “Why, Fenella?” she asked. “Why may I not call upon someone I once accounted a dear friend? Is it because the police still call me a murderess? Or is there another reason?”

“I cannot like your tone,” said Fenella, stepping fully into the room. “I think it best we let the police do their jobs and reserve our opinions—and our friendship—until then.”

Grace thrust out a hand. “What happened to Ethan's mother's portrait?” she demanded, stabbing her finger at it.

Fenella flinched as if struck. “It was damaged by the workmen,” she replied. “We had no further use for it anyway.”

Quivering with indignation, Grace paced toward her. “
Mon Dieu,
Fenella!” she whispered. “That is his mother! What are you doing to this house? What is in your mind?”

“Better to ask yourself what it is I have
undone,
”
Fenella retorted. “Ethan is dead, Grace. He is not coming back. And this—all this ostentation!” Here, she lifted both hands heavenward. “The gilt and the marble, and even this very house!”

“Fenella, what are you saying?”

“That
I am a Crane!
” Fenella gritted. “We are not Holdings. We never were. We dragged ourselves up from nothing—and on the way, yes, mayhap we stooped to drag the Holdings from bankruptcy—but always, always Cranes knew who and what we were. They did not need a monstrous mansion in Westminster or a page in Debrett's.”

“But this makes no sense!” Grace bit out. “How could you be so ungrateful? Ethan made all of you rich!”

“And at what cost?” Fenella's eyes were afire now. “Oh, Ethan knew how to sell things, but he never troubled himself to learn anything of shipbuilding. And Josiah, like his father, has his cards and his dice to occupy him. So we all flit round to our dinner parties whilst the soul of Crane Shipbuilding is hired out to draughtsmen and carpenters, and the money spent on monstrosities like this.”

“So you are undoing it all, are you?” Grace backed toward the door a step. “You begin by turning off Mrs. Holding's old servants and tearing Ethan's house down around your ears. And then what, Fenella? Do you rename the business Crane Shipping?”