She spun toward him, her finger raised and accusing, red spots of color rising in her pale cheeks. Crowther had the startling impression that if she had been within reach, she would have struck him.
“Do not dare, sir! Never for a moment. . never dare question my love for my husband! Not you! There is not another man in England of half his worth, not another man better loved by his family or more valued. I would gladly give my life. .” It seemed the air went out of her lungs. She turned away with her head down. “Do not dare, sir.”
Crowther shut his eyes briefly before opening them again and saying, “My apologies, madam. I spoke in haste.”
She would not look at him. “I hope to see you this afternoon at Berkeley Square,” she said very quietly, and left the room.
Crowther turned and slammed the wall above Bywater’s mantelpiece with the flat of his hand.
In his keenness to hear her, Sam seemed to have forgotten he was angry with Mrs. Bligh. Jocasta wiped the small beer off her mouth, took her papers from her pocket and dropped them in front of him. He touched them gently, as if they might sting.
“What do they say?” he asked.
“Can’t tell. Looks like a list of some sort, and there are numbers too. We’ll go and ask Ripley and thank him for getting Fred so messy at the chophouse.”
Sam sniggered. “Was he horrid out of it?”
“Heard him meet sharp with every stick of furnishing in the place, and all the time whining and grieving till the old bitch slapped some quiet into him.” Jocasta smiled, then went more serious again. “He went still as the grave when the other fella came in though.”
Sam shivered. “Tonton Macoute?”
“Maybe. I couldn’t hear him. His side of it was all whispered. Mother Mitchell’s voice could cut rock, though. Heard her.”
Sam had wrapped his arms round his knees. “Did they say anything on Finn and Clayton, Mrs. Bligh?”
Jocasta leaned forward to pick up Boyo by his scruff and set him on her knees. “Reckon they did. From her words, it sounded like they’d decided I’d taken warning and was gone. She praised the fella for it.” She pulled at Boyo’s ears, and the terrier twisted around to lick her hand. “She sounded fat and happy. Something happened last night that made her light-as if all their troubles were neatened. Then I heard her open the table and give him the papers.”
Sam’s eyes went wide. “Did they notice you’d filched some, Mrs. Bligh?”
She shook her head. “There were bundles. I just took a few pages from the middle, is all. Then I heard him speak.”
“What did he say?”
“If you gave a fox or a crow a voice and told it to speak quiet, I reckon it would sound like that. He said his master thought there was a sailor might give trouble. Something about a bloke picked up on a boat what might have said something he shouldn’t, so this sailor needed finding and sorting.”
“Did you hear a name?”
“Maybe. It was said lower than the rest, my mind’s still trying to get its tongue round it, and my old heart was banging about so. Then Fred was promising him more papers and the crow voice was out of the place.”
Sam’s face was so serious and thoughtful, Jocasta almost laughed. “Come on then, lad, if your breakfast’s finished. We got to go and see Ripley, then Molloy. Make our thanks and make our way.”
“What about the sailor?”
“We’ll ask about, and them as we ask will ask too, soon as I can wring a name from my head.”
3
Harriet had been aware of Isabella’s letters to Fitzraven in her possession and the necessity of reading them, but in the rush of the last days she had found it relatively simple to avoid the task. They had not been mentioned at the conclusion of their first interview with Miss Marin, and Harriet had assumed that a tacit agreement had been reached between all those present that they would be read and then returned without comment, unless comment was particularly called for. She had not liked to do so, however; it was a gross intrusion, and her own liking for the soprano had made the issue uncomfortable. Now she opened the package on her lap without any feeling other than a profound sympathy. Crowther had been right. The dead had no privacy at all.
The first letter was written from Milan and was a cautious note saying that she was glad Mr. Fitzraven had written and she would be pleased to know more of him. Harriet smiled. She could imagine that Isabella would have wished to say a great deal more, but that Morgan had been authoritative and insisted on knowing something of Fitzraven’s intentions before allowing Isabella to admit he was her father.
Harriet glanced up. Her son, Stephen, sat opposite her in the carriage in his best Sunday clothes and cradling on his lap a large model of the Splendor, James’s last and most loved command. The model had been made for him by two of Harriet’s servants at Caveley while the family was in London; both were former naval men as devoted to the boy as they had been to the father. Her housekeeper’s husband, James’s particular servant on all his commands, had recruited those of the crew he thought sufficiently trustworthy to people the vessel with little figures, and the little painted carvings had been sent back with letters and dispatches of the navy. The result was magnificent and had been sent up from the country some days previously with an enormous quantity of cheese, butter and eggs. These last had been welcomed with delight by the housekeeper at Berkeley Square and applauded as paradigms.
Harriet herself had sat at Stephen’s side while he composed his thank-you letter to the boatbuilders. He had done so with painful concentration in his own hand, and she helped a little with phrasing and mended his pen. Harriet could imagine his literary style being praised in the high stone kitchen at Caveley for days, and the little boy’s pleasure being spoken about even now on the open seas. Stephen had asked if he might bring the ship to show his Papa, and after a moment she had agreed. Now he balanced it on his lap, guarding it from every jerk and dip of the road that the Earl of Sussex’s suspension could not iron out, and when he was not lost in contemplation of the rigging, he peered out of the window. He looked, she realized, resolute. Harriet smiled and opened the next letter.
It must have been this note that had led to Fitzraven’s commission to go abroad for His Majesty’s. In it, Miss Marin said that if circumstances allowed, she would be very glad to spend some time in London. She said further that it would be a great pleasure to meet in person with Mr. Fitzraven; she would meet him and listen “with an open heart” to all he had to say, and do so in hopes of developing a fuller friendship.
Harriet could easily imagine Fitzraven coming to see Harwood with this letter in his hand-how he would have boasted of his cleverness in securing such a positive beginning to negotiations with Miss Marin. To Harwood it would look as if the prize of having the celebrated Isabella Marin singing on his stage was within his reach; to Fitzraven it would seem his luck had finally rewarded his merits and that his bastard daughter would open up a world of new influence, money and connections. And Isabella? Harriet looked out of the window, where the new buildings along Gray’s Inn Road were giving way to fields and hedgerow still dewy with the early hour. Smoke reared and bent from the chimney stacks, and Harriet’s fingers tapped on the paper in her lap. Isabella was a romantic. She had seen the possibility of redemption for her own fouled childhood; for her mother knocked down in the mud of the street. She had wished to save Fitzraven and call him Father, and now she lay, lost herself, in His Majesty’s Theatre while the street outside silted up with the tribute of yellow roses. A touching image, but not what she had had in mind.
How had their meeting been? Isabella, trying not to be disappointed in her father. Fitzraven, finding himself on short commons from Harwood’s bankers, and his daughter defended by the indomitable Morgan. It would have been indeed the moment for some enterprising agent of the French to notice him, and see a man with connections and ambition; to whom loyalty was nothing when it could be parlayed into money or influence; who wanted nothing more than to ferret out information from those who liked to have their business concealed.