Jealousy raged in Rose’s bosom but she did not recognize the emotion as jealousy. She considered it righteous anger. By being seen so publicly with such a well-known courtesan, Harry was not only damaging his reputation, but, by association, hers as well.
For once Daisy, wrapped in her own misery, was deaf to her mistress’s complaints.
♦
There was not very much social life in London before the Season. But there were calls to make and little supper parties to go to. And at each event, Rose received sly digs from the other ladies about her fiancé having been seen so often with Dolores.
The crunch came for Rose when she attended the opera with her parents and Daisy. Her parents only attended the opera because it was the thing to do and both were apt to fall asleep when the first note of the overture sounded.
Looking across at the other boxes, Rose suddenly stiffened with shock. Harry had just entered a box opposite with Dolores. She was wearing a golden silk gown with a heavy diamond-and-ruby necklace. A diamond tiara flashed on her blonde hair. Rose wondered bitterly which ladies of Paris had found their jewels missing after their doting husbands had given them to Dolores.
Her heart sank even further when her father suddenly exclaimed, “There’s Cathcart in the box opposite with that French tart!”
The countess fumbled for her opera glasses, raised them to her eyes and hissed, “Disgraceful. Rose, he will be summoned and you will break off your ridiculous engagement. Peggy Struthers is going to India with her gel. I’ll ask her to chaperone you.”
“I do not want to go to India!”
“You will do as you’re told.”
Rose could not pay attention to the opera. Dolores was flirting boldly and Harry seemed to be enjoying every moment of it.
At the interval, when everyone mingled in the crush bar, Lord Hadshire approached Harry, drew him aside and muttered, “Your presence is requested tomorrow at eleven o’clock. No, don’t say a word.”
Dolores had left Harry’s side to speak to some men. Rose followed her and as she turned away to rejoin Harry, Rose said loudly and clearly, “Leave my fiancé alone, you bitch, or I’ll kill you!”
There was a sudden shocked silence.
“That’s it!” said Lady Polly furiously, joining her daughter. “We’re going home.”
♦
Rose barely slept that night. She tossed and turned, wondering all the while how she could stop her parents from sending her to India. Parents of failed debutantes always hoped that their hitherto unmarriageable daughters would become marriageable when out in India and surrounded by lonely men far from home.
At last, Rose decided boldness was the only answer. The only record of Dolores she had been able to find in the office was her address in Cromwell Gardens in Kensington.
She would go there in the morning and confront Dolores and find out what was going on.
Daisy was alarmed when she heard Rose’s plan the next morning. “Don’t come with me,” said Rose. “Go to the office, and, if the captain asks, say I am unwell.”
♦
Not wanting to occasion comment by taking one of her father’s carriages, Rose hailed a hack and directed the driver to Kensington.
She paid off the hack in Cromwell Gardens and stood looking up at the house. Could Dolores really afford a whole house? But on approaching the door, she found it had been divided up into four flats, and Dolores’s name was on a card indicating that she lived in a house made up of two flats, one on the ground floor and one above.
Rose pulled the white bell-stop. She waited and waited. Then she tried the handle of the front door. It was unlocked. She went into a large square hall. A cleaning woman was on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor.
“Which is Miss Duval’s flat?” asked Rose.
“Door on your left, missus,” said the woman over her shoulder.
The door was slightly open. Rose knocked and then called. No reply. She stepped inside the flat. She would leave her card on a tray she could see on the side table. She took out her card case, and then put it away again. Dolores might only be amused by the fact she had called. Then she saw the door to a front parlour was open. She walked towards it. Perhaps there might be some evidence of why Dolores had hired Harry.
The first thing she saw was one slippered foot lying behind a sofa by the window. Her heart began to thud. Rose walked around the sofa and let out a sharp scream of fright. Dolores was lying dead on the floor. She was dressed only in a white silk-and-lace nightgown and an elaborately embroidered dressing gown. A red stain of blood had seeped from a hole in her chest. A revolver was lying on the floor beside her. Numb with shock, Rose picked up the revolver.
A loud scream erupted from behind her. Rose swung round, eyes dilated with fright, the revolver still in her hand. It was the cleaning woman. “Murder!” she screeched and then ran out into the street, shouting, “Murder. Perlees! Murder!”
People began to crowd in to Dolores’s flat. Rose stared at them and they stared at Rose until a man walked forward and took the revolver from her.
“What’s going on here?” A policeman thrust his way through the crowd. A chorus of voices rose, some shouting, “She murdered her. She had the gun in her hand.”
“I didn’t… I found her,” whispered Rose through white lips.
“Name?”
“Lady Rose Summer.”
The policeman turned and shooed everyone out of the flat. He saw a telephone on a table by the fireplace and dialled Scotland Yard.
♦
“My business with Miss Duval is confidential,” Harry was saying to the enraged earl.
“You paraded yourself and that trollop at the opera in front of everyone. Your engagement to my daughter is off What is it, Jarvis?”
The earl’s secretary was hovering nervously in the doorway.
“I beg your pardon, my lord, but I have received an urgent call from Scotland Yard. Lady Rose has been arrested for murder.”
∨ Our Lady of Pain ∧
Two
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing,
and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
– Oscar Wilde
Superintendent Kerridge knew Rose. She had been involved in several of his previous cases. He had her escorted to his office and served with hot sweet tea, anxious to interrogate her quickly, as he was sure the earl was about to descend on him with a battalion of lawyers.
Kerridge was a grey man: grey hair, grey bushy eyebrows, grey face, and all set off with a grey suit. He had a soft spot for Lady Rose, probably because he sensed a misfit like himself. Inside Kerridge burned a dreamer who would like to see the aristocracy hanging from the lamp posts. But he kept his views to himself. He had a wife and children to look after.
“Now, my lady,” he began, “tell me exactly what happened and why you were there.”
“I saw Harry – Captain Cathcart – at the opera with Miss Duval. He had told me he was investigating something for her, but I felt he was disgracing me by association. He had no right to appear to be escorting her. I went to have it out with her. The door was open. When I walked in, I saw a foot protruding from behind the sofa. I walked round. She was dead. Shot. I screamed. There was a revolver lying next to her. I was dazed with shock. I picked it up and then the cleaning woman rushed in and began crying murder.”
There came the sounds of a loud altercation outside and Kerridge damned the advent of the motor car, which got people from point A to point B so quickly.
A police officer put his head around the door. “Sir, Lord Hadshire is here – ” he had begun when he was rudely thrust aside. The earl bustled in, followed by his wife, Lady Polly, Captain Harry and Sir Crispin Briggs, Q.C.