When the devil drives, p.24
When the Devil Drives, page 24
‘I need to speak to somebody in the Foreign Office about a serious matter concerning relations between Britain and Saxe Coburg. It’s so delicate that I must ask you to forgive me for not going into more details, even to you. It’s so urgent that the meeting should take place in the next few hours. I don’t suppose my name will mean anything to your office. All I can say is that Mr and Mrs Talbot can assure them that I am not mad. If Mr Disraeli were back in the country, I believe he would vouch for me. Apart from that, I can only rely on your judgement.’
Mr Calloway heard me out, with very little change of expression. His shapely eyebrows lifted just a fraction at the reference to Disraeli. He was more influential than most backbench MPs, but so unpredictable that the Foreign Office would probably sniff sulphur around him. Still, it was the best I could do. For a second or two after I’d finished speaking, Mr Calloway considered. One of the Talbot children shouted in the corridor outside and was shushed by her nursemaid.
‘Is there anything else at all you can tell me?’ Mr Calloway said. The voice and the question were both reasonable.
‘One thing. Whoever you speak to, please tell him that it concerns the maze and the Minotaur. If I’m right, he’ll understand.’
‘That’s all?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid that’s all.’
‘Very well, I’ll try to do what you ask. Where may we find you?’
‘Miss Lane will be staying with us,’ George Talbot said.
‘Thank you. I’m truly grateful for what you’ve done, but I must go home,’ I said to him. Then, to Mr Calloway: ‘I live at Abel Yard, off Adam’s Mews. I shall wait there until somebody comes to me, but please ask them to make it soon.’
He nodded, looking more serious than when he’d arrived. When George came back from showing him out, I promised to let him know what was happening as soon as I could.
‘You’ll say goodbye to Beattie at least?’
She was in the kitchen, discussing the day’s menu with their cook. When she saw me, she ran to me and took my hand.
‘George says you won’t stay.’
‘I wish I could.’
With all my heart. Their kind, well-ordered life had never looked more enticing. Beatrice wanted to call the carriage out to take me home, but I said the walk across the park would clear my head.
Under a grey sky, I walked to Grosvenor Square and knocked on the contessa’s door. After a long wait, it was answered by a maid I hadn’t seen before, in a rusty black dress with her hair tied up in a scarf.
‘They’ve all gone away. The landlord’s sent me in to clean.’
I asked if I might go up to look. She wasn’t sure, but two shillings settled the question. She showed me upstairs into what had been the contessa’s salon. Bare chairs and tables awaited the next tenant in a room blank as a stubble field. The contessa’s soft rainbow of shawls and cushions, the servants in their blue and silver liveries, had vanished as if the backcloth of a pantomime had been rolled away. I thought that the people responsible for it must have spent thousands on the contessa’s household alone, probably multiplied ten times over by other parts of the same network. There’d have been the simple bribes to hack journalists like Codling, more complicated ones to gentlemen and ladies primed to whisper gossip at society dinner tables. Considering the stakes, tens of thousands were probably small change to them. I’d been small change too.
Back at Abel Yard, I found Mr Colley’s idle son-in-law and gave him a shilling to stand at the bottom of my staircase and shout up if any gentleman arrived. The parlour still smelled of soot and felt cold and empty. I wondered whether to make up the fire to boil a kettle for tea, but couldn’t summon the energy. After a while I remembered the bottle of port wine that Mrs Martley kept in the cupboard because she said it was good for her blood and drank two glasses of it straight off. That made me feel well enough to open my two letters. The cover of the thinner one, from Paris, was addressed in Disraeli’s handwriting.
Dear Miss Lane,
A propos of the gentleman you mention, I cannot recall meeting anybody of that description in Stuttgart, in fact I am positively sure I did not. It is one of the perils of being a man in the public eye that half the rogues in the world will claim acquaintanceship – a category to which I suspect your Mr Clyde may belong. We shall return to London shortly, when I look forward to hearing if my suspicions were correct.
Yours in haste, Benjamin Disraeli.
It was only what I’d expected, but I was angry with the man for lingering so long on the Continent and being out of London when I needed him. I hesitated before opening the other, much fatter letter from Robert Carmichael. I wanted so much to hear his kind, clever voice – even if only in my imagination as I read. But so much had happened in the short time he’d been away that I was scared it would make a gulf between us. I walked up and down the room, listening all the time for a call from the yard to let me know I had a visitor. After a while I sat down, opened the packet and started reading.
My dear Liberty,
How I wish you were here with me. With six days to go to the wedding, and the castle filling up, cousins two or three times removed are being stowed even in the semi-ruinous parts of it. The womenfolk are entirely involved with the forthcoming festivities. The sisters (it is three by the way) are all to be bridesmaids and much of our evenings here after dinner are devoted to the quizzing and teasing of them as to which one is to be next married. All of the bachelors are considered fair game. As a man mostly unknown, I am considered as a suitable stalking horse for a young lady with somebody else in her sights. As a sample:
Sister Two: Is not my sister Alice a beauty?
Self: (knowing the rules by now) To be sure, you are a family of beauties.
Sister Two: But some more beautiful than others?
Sister Three: (hitting Sister Two’s arm with fan) Vanny, you’re fishing. Stop it.
Sister Two: (hand fluttering to the sleeve of my jacket and away again) I am not, so. Besides, it’s Sarah he really likes, isn’t it? Confess it now.
And all the while, the men they want to notice them watch, listen and wonder whether to quarrel with me.
While I was reading, I’d even forgotten to listen for a shout from the yard. I opened the window and looked down. Nobody. The next pages in Robert’s packet were written in a darker ink with a better pen nib.
If the truth be told, we men are feeling a little bored. We fish in the lake. We ride over the tussocky moorland around the castle on some remarkably good horses. We shoot snipe in the marshy area around the lake. Or some of us do. The fact is, I have disgraced myself. You know the snipe? What a ridiculous bird, with its round body, long bill and complacent look as it roots in the mud for its food. This morning, there I was with my boots up to the ankles in mud, my borrowed gun ready, and up go the snipe, crying chicka chicka chick. I’m about to squeeze the trigger and other men’s guns are popping all round me, when the contrast strikes me of all our powder and gunnery against such a silly bird and I laugh out loud. A quotation from Shakespeare comes into my head: ‘O! It is excellent/To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous/To use it like a giant.’ The surprising thing is, it comes to me in your voice, my dear, although I’m sure you never in reality spoke it to me. So I put my gun down and the snipe that should have fallen to it fly free.
‘So you’re not much of a shot then,’ says Rosa’s brother Michael to me.
He can’t make out what manner of man I am. I’d help him, if I could, but I’m not sure myself.
I was unreasonably pleased that my voice might have spared the snipe, but sorry that this hint of self-doubt had crept back into his mind. I’d been right not to let him tie himself down to an impulsive decision he might have regretted. I went all the way down the stairs to check that there was nobody waiting, then back upstairs to my letter.
Three days later.
Oh my dear, I wish even more that you were here so you could tell me I’m a fool. This evening, after dinner:
Alice: Sarah’s going to lose a guinea over you.
Self: I’m very sorry for it. Was she backing me at bringing home the biggest bag of snipe?
Alice: Michael’s bet her a guinea you won’t ride in the race tomorrow.
Self: What race would that be?
Alice: The gentlemen are having a race to Kibble End. They’re going to draw for horses.
Self: So why should Sarah lose her guinea?
Alice: You mean you’ll ride?
Self: Indeed I’ll ride.
So two idiocies in one. First, I committed myself to a race over a couple of miles of rough country against a dozen or so Irish centaurs. Second, I confirmed Alice’s belief that I was romantically attracted to sister Sarah, to the extent that I was prepared to risk my neck to save her a slight injury to the purse.
I sat with the page unturned, annoyed with myself for being so annoyed. Silly girls, with nothing to fill their time but gossip and matchmaking. I imagined them, with their beautiful dark hair and laughing eyes. I turned the page and read on.
The horse I drew was one Bucephalus, stable name Boozy. When his name came out of the punch bowl I was congratulated by the other gentlemen on having a possible winner with ‘a mouth like a granite tombstone, but won’t stop this side of Kilkenny.’ They didn’t add that he was getting on for eighteen hands high, a fact I found out for myself in the stable yard in the grey drizzle next morning. Our starting line-up was far from regular and Boozy, spinning like a top from excitement, was facing the wrong way when the order was given. He whirled round and caught up with the rest in two or three giant strides, over the first fence before I saw it coming then across ploughland with the air so full of flying clods that I don’t suppose any of us could see where we were going. After the first two or three fences, something struck me – that Boozy and I were up with the leaders and I was enjoying this. Of course, I’d ridden over fences before, but not banks. Have you jumped a bank? If so, you know that amazing feeling when your horse touches down on the top then flies off the other side as if he’d abandoned the earth entirely.
Yes, I have. I know it. I’m aching to be there riding with you. I’m laughing too, out loud with a release from tension, as if I really were galloping beside you, with clods of ploughland flying round us.
‘Visitors.’
The call of the son-in-law, coming up from the yard. Then a knock on the door and Mr Calloway’s voice.
‘Miss Lane? May we come up please?’
We. So he’d brought somebody with him as I’d asked, the person of importance. And that person’s introduction to me, as he came into the yard, would have been the sound of a woman’s laughter through the open window. He’d take me for a lunatic, if the thought weren’t in his mind already. I looked out on Calloway’s upturned face and the top of the hat of a man standing beside him.
‘Come up,’ I said. ‘The door’s unlatched.’
Mr Calloway came into the room first. ‘Miss Lane, may I introduce . . .’
The other man had taken off his hat and was looking at me, his face giving nothing away. I needn’t have worried about the impression my laughter had made on him because this wasn’t our first encounter after all. Mr Calloway’s senior colleague from the Foreign Office had visited my house before to try to bribe or bully me and I strongly suspected he’d had a hand in trying to burn it down. I was looking at Stone Man.
TWENTY-ONE
Calloway probably expected us to shake hands. He repeated the introduction, which was just as well because, in my surprise, I hadn’t caught the name.
‘May I introduce Sir Francis Downton.’
‘Thank you, Calloway. We have met before. You may leave us now,’ Stone Man said.
Calloway showed a spark of rebellion in insisting on civil manners. ‘Will you excuse me then, Miss Lane?’
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Can you confirm that Sir Francis is known to you and is from the Foreign Office?’
The other man made an impatient noise. Calloway flushed but stood his ground.
‘Yes. Sir Francis holds a senior position in the foreign secretary’s private office.’
So, Lord Palmerston’s right-hand man. From the expression on Stone Man’s face, he thought Calloway was giving me too much information.
‘Thank you,’ I said to Calloway. ‘If you need to go, of course you must. But I’m grateful to you.’
Calloway walked to the door, then turned. ‘I shall wait for you downstairs, Miss Lane.’
Which was downright heroic and I guessed he was waving away any chance of standing high in Sir Francis’ favour.
‘Sit down, if you like,’ I said to Sir Francis. ‘I’d apologize for the smell of soot, except it’s probably your fault.’
‘My fault!’ He seemed genuinely astonished. ‘How am I to blame for the deficiencies of your chimney sweep?’
‘Somebody tried to burn this building down soon after your last visit.’
He sat down heavily in a chair by the cold fireplace. He looked more strained than I’d seen him five days ago, with a nervous twitch of the left eyebrow.
‘I assure you, it had nothing to do with me. I tried to warn you that you were playing a dangerous game.’
‘You accused me of spreading scandalous rumours,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know what you meant then, but I do now. That’s why I asked Mr Calloway to introduce me to somebody senior from the Foreign Office. He knows nothing about any of this. He’s simply an acquaintance doing me a favour.’
I took the chair on the opposite side of the fireplace. Sir Francis sat, buttoned up in his overcoat, staring at me. Then he sighed as if he’d come to an unhappy decision.
‘Miss Lane, I assume you’ve summoned me because you want to tell me something you believe you’ve discovered.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’ll spare you the trouble of telling me the story. You have evidence, or believe you have, that a certain very distinguished visitor to this country is involved in a series of unlawful incidents.’
‘That Prince Ernest of Saxe Coburg and members of his household are responsible for at least three murders of young women and possibly more?’ I said.
He’d been expecting that, and didn’t blink. ‘But that’s hardly a great discovery on your part is it, Miss Lane, seeing that several grubby scandal sheets have been hinting at it for a week or more.’
‘But they only have part of the story. Do they know the girl found by the Achilles was a housemaid from Limehouse? Do they know about the ice barges? Do they know that the devil’s chariot has been spotted outside the White Lion at Egham, by Windsor Great Park?’
The outside edge of his left eyebrow went into uncontrollable spasm. All this was new to him.
‘Another thing the scandal sheets don’t know yet,’ I said. ‘The woman found dead by the Copper Horse yesterday morning claimed to be an intimate acquaintance of Prince Ernest.’
‘Who are you working for?’ He’d asked the same question on his first visit, trying to bully and bribe. Now he was simply weary, so I told him.
‘He said his name was Mr Clyde – a false name of course. I’m not working for him any more. He had the contessa killed, probably the others as well.’
I told Sir Francis about Mr Clyde’s approach to me, to his story of the contessa’s mission, and what followed.
‘I honestly believed he was trying to prevent a scandal,’ I said. ‘Either he or the contessa knew about the prince’s plans in advance. She knew he’d be making a private visit that night in Kensington when I gave him her letter.’
His look made me hesitate.
‘Or are you going to tell me that it wasn’t really Prince Ernest I saw?’
‘Yes, it was the prince.’
Some kind of barrier had been crossed. He didn’t trust me, but he wasn’t insulting me any more. I was glad about that because I’d decided to tell him most of what I knew or guessed.
‘I think this business of delivering a letter to him was so that I could see the prince and identify him as being in London that day,’ I said. ‘The man who called himself Clyde kept insisting on secrecy, but I was really meant to tell people all about it.’
A nod from Sir Francis.
‘I suppose I was credulous,’ I said. ‘I believed that Clyde was trying to prevent a scandal. But it was quite the reverse. He wanted to create one. What he thought he’d found in me was a woman who had contacts in society, whose services might be hired. Perhaps he’d found out enough about me to know I had friends in the press as well.’
Another nod.
‘Whoever’s employing Clyde, it’s somebody who doesn’t wish the Saxe Coburgs well,’ I said. ‘They’re determined to prevent that engagement becoming official. They’d do anything, spend anything to stop that.’
‘Yes.’
He’d committed himself. I pressed for more.
‘The contessa – did she really know Prince Ernest?’
‘She was not a contessa.’
‘But she knew him?’
‘Yes.’
‘In the way she implied?’
‘They had met.’
‘More than met?’
‘Yes.’
‘So who was she?’
‘An actress, from a theatre in Dresden. Part German, part Italian. The prince’s circle in Dresden did associate with theatre people and such. It’s quite possible she had convinced herself that her association with His Highness was of a more lasting nature than was likely in reality.’
‘In other words, she was just another discarded mistress and the man who called himself Mr Clyde was making use of her,’ I said. He’d made use of me as well, and I’d admired his fine, sad eyes and pitied him. But I didn’t intend to admit that to the man from the Foreign Office.
