“Von Stühlen! What you've endured, old fellow! A nasty business, that, in Sheerness—”
“Yes,” he agreed. “A nasty business.”
He reached Paris the day after Christmas.
A rough ferry crossing from Dover, and an interminable rail journey to the capital made tedious by an unexpected fall of snow. He was unruffled by these delays, however; there was no longer any need for haste or stealth in the hunt he pursued. Theo Fitzgerald-Hastings had changed everything.
When the boy lunged for his pistol and attempted to wrest it from his hand, von Stühlen had experienced one of those odd moments that intersect a life, from time to time: an instant of clarity that would hang, persistent as a mirage, before his mind until he died. The duel in which he had lost his eye was one of these. So, too, was the childhood vision of his mother returning from a morning call, with her left stocking laddered—he had seen her depart the house a few hours earlier with the same ladder on her right leg, and understood, in a flash of pain, that she had somehow removed her clothes quite carelessly during the interval. In that single image was contained all he need ever know about women: their betrayals, their fundamental whorishness, their stupidity. Theo's death was a crystallised revelation, like all of these.
He had watched the pistol discharge into the boy's collarbone, had seen the mouth open in agony as the young body went down; had known, without hesitation, what must follow. The pool of blood growing on the stones of the ancient forecourt. Jasper Horan seizing the bridle of the plunging horse and the other men hanging back, all of them afraid.
He could have staunched the bleeding. Driven Theo to a doctor in Sheerness in his hired fly. But the boy would have told everyone how he came to have his wound, and von Stühlen saw no point in that. Compassion had never been his failing.
He stood over Theo while his life bled away, the pistol still leveled. At first the boy thought he was toying with him—that he merely wanted some kind of information—but von Stühlen made no answer to his desperate questions. When Theo finally stopped pleading, von Stühlen had the horse put into the stable and the body laid nearby, in the straw.
Later, at the funeral in Kent—the Earl of Monteith entombing his heir, a collection of somber men walking behind the black horses and carriage—von Stühlen recounted what had happened. How he'd arrived at Shurland intending to pay a call upon Lady Maude—an old acquaintance—and had found the house empty and the boy bleeding to death in the straw, half-conscious. He had done what he could, of course. It had not been enough. But before he died, young Theo had named his killer.
“I would not have thought it of him,” Monteith said brokenly, shaking his head. “Even an Irishman ought to cherish his son. Even an Irishman cannot be so entirely a stranger to decency—”
“There was bad feeling between them,” interjected the Frenchwoman, Madame duFief, when she met von Stühlen later, at the Earl's seat. “On account of my Lady Maude. Theo could not abide his father, you know. He blamed him. Poor child. So much tragedy, so young—it is a family destined for unhappiness, is it not?”
She would, von Stühlen thought, be a useful witness at Fitzgerald's trial.
The afternoon of his arrival, he paid an informal call at the British Embassy.
It was a beautiful old hôtel particulier in the Palladian style, just off the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré, with a court embraced by two wings and a garden out back. The Queen's envoy to Paris, Henry Richard Charles Wellesley, Earl Cowley, was a stranger to von Stühlen—he had been at his post for the past nine years. But that meant nothing; the Earl was Wellington's nephew and von Stühlen was everywhere recognised as one of the late Consort's intimates. He was accustomed to doors opening without hesitation.
“An Irishman? Wanted for murder?” Cowley sniffed. His own extended family was Irish born and bred, and the scandal must be felt. “I've had no wind of him—no, sir! Nor his woman neither. Had all the local community of English into the embassy, of course, for wassail and waits—burning of the Yule log and lighting of the festive tree, don't you know—a few days back; but an Irishman? Not a hair. Should've remembered that. And the lady's beautiful, you say?”
“In her way,” von Stühlen agreed. “Highly-cultivated—with an air of intelligence and breeding. Her name is Georgiana Armistead.”
“Damme if I don't know what gels get up to these days,” Lord Cowley muttered. “Have one or two of my own, and couldn't get them married soon enough. Well! You've escaped parson's mousetrap clear enough, hey? And more power to you. What's the rogue's name, then?”
“Fitzgerald, my lord.”
“Fitzgerald! No relation to Leinster's family?”
Henry Wellesley, thirty years before, had married one of the Duke of Leinster's granddaughters—Olivia Fitzgerald. Von Stühlen smiled faintly at the notion of a barrister being related to a duke.
“He's a Papist. No possible connexion of yours.”
The Earl blinked owlishly, as though debating whether to resent this German's display of family knowledge—then abruptly slapped his hand on his mahogany desk.
“If the man's a murderer and this Armistead woman is in his keeping, we shall have to do our all to apprehend them. I shall speak to the Minister of Police, naturally—but the pair mayn't still be in Paris. You've thought of that, I suppose?”
“Perhaps a telegram, to your consulates,” von Stühlen suggested. “Fitzgerald will have submitted his intended route of travel to a mairie somewhere, upon landing in this country. There should be a trail we may follow. The consulates will find it—or their local police.”
“Damme!” the Earl said again. “A cloak-and-dagger business, enough. Yes, Wentworth—what is it?”
“Lord Rokeby's report from Nice, my lord,” said a junior political officer, breezing into Lord Cowley's office. “He appears to have enjoyed an admirable Christmas feast with the ladies at Château Leader.”
“Ah! Indeed. Excellent man, Rokeby. Played cricket with his father at Eton, you know. He's standing unofficial guardian to the little Prince sent down to Cannes for his health, now that Sir Edward Bowater has most unfortunately stuck his spoon in the wall. P'raps you're acquainted with the lad?”
“Leopold?” von Stühlen repeated. “Naturally I am acquainted with him. How does the boy fare, in France?”
“Well—hear for yourself!” Lord Cowley settled a pair of spectacles on his ears and commenced to read aloud, to his guest's increasing interest, Lord Rokeby's report of everything—and everyone—who had celebrated Christmas with the Prince in Cannes.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Sir Thomas Robinson Woolfield was an immensely wealthy Englishman. He had made his money in the building trade, and used it, during his prime, to bring the seaside village of Cannes into fashion. His great friend, Lord Henry Brougham—who had founded the Edinburgh Review, abolished slavery in the English colonies, and sat in Earl Grey's cabinet before his elevation to the House of Lords—liked to say that he had discovered Cannes thirty years before, and made it the sanitorium of Europe; and to be fair, it was Brougham's living there when Parliament was out of session that made the village such an object of curiosity to the London ton. It was Robinson Woolfield, however, who built the houses the Fashionable Great chose to live in, while they strolled the promenade des anglais in Nice.