The Dark Enquiry

The SECOND CHAPTER

If it be a man’s work, I’ll do it.

—King Lear

That afternoon, my errands accomplished, I took refuge in my sister Portia’s town house. She gave me tea and brought out her newly adopted daughter for me to see. The infant, Jane, was carried by her very competent Indian nurse who had come from Darjeeling with us, and I greeted Nanny Stone warmly. Of course, her real name was nothing like Stone, but she had been delighted with all things English, and had put off her beautiful silken saris and her lovely Hindi name in favour of a black bombazine gown with a starched pinafore and the appellation of Nanny Stone. She had mastered the fundamentals of English before leaving her native land, but she had applied herself diligently to perfecting it by engaging anyone who would speak to her in lengthy conversations. The result was a curious mixture of interesting grammar and street slang, spoken in her lovely lilting accent.

She had dressed the baby in emerald-green, an inspired choice against the child’s fluffy halo of ginger hair. The baby clutched a coral teething ring in one plump fist and drooled excessively as the nurse held her out.

I returned the smile, albeit with an effort. “I don’t think I will take her just now, Nanny. She seems a bit moist.”

Nanny Stone plucked a handkerchief from her pocket and began to wipe at the child, crooning some soft cradlesong.

“Nanny, I think her gums are paining her again. Perhaps a bit more of the oil of clove?” Portia suggested.

What followed was a painfully dull debate on the merits of oil of clove for a toothache as compared to Nanny’s native remedies, and in the end Nanny prevailed, bearing her charge off to the nursery to apply some mixture of her own devising.

When they had gone, Portia fixed me with a reproachful glance. “She is your goddaughter, Julia. You will have to hold her sometime.”

I clucked my tongue. “I am very well aware she is my goddaughter. If you will recall, I gave her a lovely set of Apostle spoons to mark the occasion. Now, she is a love, Portia, and I am very fond of her, but you must admit, she is a very damp child. There is always something moist about her mouth or her nose or other places,” I added primly. She glowered, and I hurried on. “I am just not terribly comfortable with babies. Perhaps when she is a bit older and I can take her to the shops or the theatre,” I said brightly.

Portia gave me a little push and we settled in to her morning room to discuss my husband’s duplicity.

“You really think he means to get rid of you?” she asked, eyes wide. Portia loved few things in life so much as a good bit of gossip. She curled onto the sofa with her ancient pug, Mr. Pugglesworth, a flatulent old lapdog who ought to have been dead at least five years past.

“For a few days, at least. Plum is entirely capable of managing the Mortlake case on his own,” I added with a meaningful look. Plum was a handsome fellow, and when he exerted himself, the most charming of our brothers. Wooing a young lady, even one as ill-disposed towards him as Lady Felicity Mortlake, would be child’s play to him. “No, Brisbane had some other purpose in putting me out of London. And not just out of London,” I told her, drawing down my brows significantly. “He is trying to keep me away from Chapel Street altogether.”

Portia looked at me reprovingly. “One cannot entirely blame him, dearest. You have attempted to burn down the place on at least three separate occasions.”

“Four,” I corrected, thinking of the previous day. “And I know I could master the self-igniting black powder if I had enough time.”

“But you think Brisbane had another reason for wanting to be rid of you,” she said, leading me gently back to the subject at hand.

“Hmm? Yes. He was quite artful about it, but he most definitely indicated that I should not visit the consulting rooms before I left town.”

“Because there was something there he did not want you to see?” she hazarded.

“Someone,” I corrected. Quickly, I related to her my activities that afternoon. I had stationed myself in a nondescript hackney cab on Park Street with a careful view to anyone who approached the consulting rooms from Park Lane. Some two hours into my watch, I had seen something—someone—most unexpected.

“Bellmont!” Portia cried. Her colour was high and her eyes bright, and I was glad of it. She had suffered the tragic loss of her dearest companion earlier in the year, and the child, Jane, had come to her as a result of this death. Unexpected motherhood and the loss of her beloved had been difficult burdens, and I was happy to see her so peaceful within herself that she could be engaged in my little problems.

“Yes, dearest. And I put it to you, what business could our eldest brother possibly have with my husband?” Bellmont had made his disapproval in the match clear. Brisbane’s livelihood touched too near the bone of being in trade, and Bellmont, while perfectly cordial, had never behaved with anything like true warmth towards my husband. But then, Bellmont was not known to show warmth towards anyone in particular. He adored his wife, Adelaide, but we often snickered in the family that the extent of their physical warmth was a yearly handshake. How they managed to beget a family of six was a question to twist the sharpest wits. He was a creature of politics and propriety, devoted to his own ideals and wildly at odds with the eccentricity for which our family was famed. It was often said that the expression “mad as a March hare” was coined at the antics of our forebears, whose heraldic badge was a hare. Bellmont did everything in his power to distance himself from that reputation.

“Perhaps blood will out,” Portia suggested wickedly. “What if he has got himself a dancing girl and wants Brisbane to destroy the evidence before Adelaide gets word of it!”

I snickered. “Lord Salisbury, more like. Bellmont is far more concerned with the Prime Minister’s opinion than his wife’s.” Since Lord Salisbury’s last rise to power, Bellmont had assumed a significant role in the government, often introducing legislation in the Commons crafted to further his mentor’s policies.

“Oh!” Portia sat up quickly, disturbing the dog. “Hush, Puggy,” she soothed as he gave an irritable growl. “Mummy didn’t mean it.” She turned to me. “Perhaps Virgilia is being pursued by a questionable sort.”

I blinked at the mention of Bellmont’s eldest daughter. “Virgilia came out two years ago. Is she still on the loose? I rather thought Bellmont would have arranged something for her by now.”

“You know Bellmont has a blind spot where she is concerned.” Puggy emitted a foul noise, followed hard by an even fouler odour, but Portia ignored him. “He has grown quite sentimental of late about Gilly. He has been very worried about an attachment she has formed with Lord Fairbrother’s heir. He promised if she made no formal arrangements with the lad, he would consider the match.”

I lifted a brow. “The season ended three months ago. Has he really prevented her from entering into an engagement? I must credit him with greater powers of persuasion than I thought.”

Portia shrugged. “Gilly has always been his favourite, I suspect because she resembles Mother.” I said nothing. Our mother had died in childbed with our youngest brother when I was very small. I did not remember her at all; I carried only the vaguest recollection of the rustle of yellow skirts and the scent of lemon verbena. But Portia remembered more, and sometimes, when she fell silent and brooding, I knew she was thinking of our mother, who had laughed and danced and left us far too soon. As the eldest, Bellmont would have remembered her better than any. He had been almost grown at her death, and I sometimes thought he had felt it most keenly.

“All the more reason for him to forbid the match entirely if he truly objects to the Fairbrother boy. What is wrong with the fellow?”

Portia gave me a little smile. “He is a devoted follower of Mr. Gladstone.” We laughed aloud then to think of our priggish elder brother forced to spend the rest of his natural life with a son-in-law who was entirely committed to the Liberal cause. Bellmont loathed Gladstone, not the least because Sir William had been a frequent visitor to our house during our formative years. Our devoted Aunt Hermia had been so moved by Gladstone’s work with prostitutes that she had formed her own Whitechapel house of reform for teaching ladies of the night the domestic trades. Most of our ladies’ maids had come from her refuge, including my own Morag. I ought to have applied to Aunt Hermia to help me staff my new home, but one reformed prostitute in my employ was quite my limit.

“Poor Bellmont,” I said at last. “Still, I wonder if he would stoop to asking Brisbane to ferret out something unsavoury to keep poor Gilly from an engagement.”

“If there is something unsavoury about the fellow, Bellmont has a right to know it,” Portia pointed out rather primly. I stared at her. Since becoming a mother, her own priggish tendencies, once entirely smothered, were coming occasionally to the fore.

“Yes, but I hope he has not taken it in his head to ask Brisbane to create some fiction of impropriety to prevent the marriage.”

“Would Brisbane do such a thing?”

“Of course not!” I returned hotly. “Brisbane has a greater sense of integrity than any man I have ever known, including any of our family.”

“Then you have nothing to worry about,” she said, her voice honey smooth. Portia was convinced, but I was not. Something about the set of his shoulders as he walked away from Chapel Street told me something was very wrong with our eldest brother. His usual arrogance had been taken down a bit, and the aristocratic set of his chin—quite natural in a man who was heir to an earldom of seven hundred years’ duration—had softened. Was it merely the thought of losing his beloved daughter to a political opponent that gnawed at him? Or did he wrestle with something greater?

I meant to find out. I turned to Portia. “In any event, you must see that it is impossible for me to go away. I have to know what Bellmont is about.”

“Why?” she demanded. She wore a mantle of calm as easily as any Renaissance Madonna, and I suppressed a sigh of impatience at her newfound serenity.

“Because either Bellmont is in trouble or Brisbane is,” I told her with some heat.

“Brisbane? What sort of trouble? And why would he look to Bellmont for aid?”

I spread my hands. “I do not know. But if Brisbane were in some sort of trouble, his first inclination, his very first, would be to see me safely out of the way. You know how annoying he is upon the point of my personal safety.” The issue was one—the only one, in fact—that caused dissension in our marriage, but it was a common refrain. “And once I was safely out of the way, he might well turn to Bellmont. Our brother is superbly connected, one of the most trusted men in government, and he has the ear of the Prime Minister. One snap of the fingers from Lord Salisbury, and whatever trouble Brisbane might have found himself in goes away.” I snapped my fingers for emphasis, rousing Puggy who promptly flatulated again.

“True,” Portia said, somewhat reluctantly. “But I cannot imagine a situation Brisbane couldn’t extricate himself from. The man is as clever and elusive as a cat,” she added, and I knew she meant it as a compliment.

“Yes, but even cats need more than one life,” I reminded her. “And this particular cat now has a partner to look after him.” I took a deep breath and lifted my chin. Whatever difficulty beset my husband, I was determined to see it through by his side, offering whatever aid and succour I could.

I fixed my sister with a deliberate look. “And that is why I have formed a plan…”

I arrived home to find Brisbane busily engaged in a project that required a pair of workmen wearing leather aprons, endless spools of wires and significant alterations to the cupboard under the stairs.

“Brisbane?”

He backed out of the cupboard, shooting his cuffs. “You are rather earlier than I expected. I had hoped to present you with a surprise.”

He gave me a bland smile and I narrowed my eyes in suspicion. I had reason to be cautious of his surprises, I reflected.

“What is this?” I asked, collecting the workmen and their wires with a sweep of my arm.

“A telephone,” Brisbane informed me.

I stared, blinking hard. “A telephone? To what purpose?”

“To the purpose of being able to speak upon it,” he explained with exaggerated patience.

“Yes, but to whom? In order to speak upon the telephone, one must know someone else with a telephone.”

“We do.” He wore an air of satisfaction. “I am having a second one installed in Chapel Street. We shall be able to communicate with the consulting rooms from here and vice versa.”

“We are paying for two telephones?” I asked, sotto voce. I had no wish to quarrel with Brisbane, particularly over money, and most particularly in front of workmen. Still, the expense was staggering. “Whatever would possess you?”

“It will be extremely convenient for my work,” he replied smoothly. “I am surprised you are not more enthusiastic, my dear. I should have thought the notion that we could speak with one another at any time would have appealed to you.”

“Of course it does,” I told him in full sincerity. “I was simply taken by surprise. It does seem a rather complicated enterprise.”

“Not at all,” he assured me. “In fact, Bellmont has had a device for some weeks and says it is quite the most useful invention.”

“Bellmont?” My pulses quickened. “Have you spoken with him recently?”

Brisbane was skilled at cards, and with a gambler’s sense of timing, he did not pause for an instant. He merely lifted one broad shoulder into a shrug. “Not since the last dinner at March House. But Bellmont and I spoke at length about it then. Surely you heard us. And you were supposed to ask your Aunt Hermia to give you the recipe for the persimmon sauce she served with the duck that night. It was particularly good.”

Brisbane’s lie had taken the warmth out of the room. I felt a chill seep into my bones, and when I spoke, it was through lips stiff with cold. “I am afraid I forgot. I will send a message to March House to ask her for it. We will have it when I return from the country,” I added, twisting my lips into a semblance of a smile. “I must see if Morag has finished the packing if I am to leave tomorrow,” I told him, turning towards the stairs.

“Pity Lord Mortlake doesn’t have one of these,” he said, nodding to the device being fixed to the wall. “I would have been able to speak to you even in the country.”

I silently blessed the fact that the expense of telephones had kept most of our acquaintances from their use. The last thing I needed was Brisbane telephoning the Mortlake country house only to find I had never arrived.

I gave him a brilliant, deceitful smile. “A pity indeed, my love.”

The next morning, I dispatched my trunk and Morag to the country with very specific instructions.

“It will never work,” she warned me. “That Lady Mortlake might have less sense than a rabbit, but even she will notice a missing guest.”

“Not if you do precisely as I have ordered,” I retorted. “It is very simple, really. I have already left a note for my brother that I mean to take the early train. He is a late riser, and by the time he reads the note, the early train will have already departed with you and my trunk. When you arrive at the Mortlake house, it will be far earlier than expected. They will be at sixes and sevens,” I continued. “You have only to request my trunk be sent to my room and explain that I had a headache from the train and wished to walk in the garden before I saw anyone.”

Morag was listening closely, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth. But disapproval lurked at the back of her gaze, and I hurried on. “You will say that my headache has not improved, and you will make my excuses tonight at dinner. I am unwell and wish to see no one as I mean to retire early. I have already written a note of apology to Lady Mortlake, which you will send down when the dinner gong is sounded. It explains that I am dreadfully sorry but I am simply too ill to meet with anyone, and that I am quite certain the fresh country air will revive me by breakfast.”

“And when it doesn’t? What then? Shall I tell them you’ve gone for a walk and fallen in the carp pond?” she asked nastily.

I took her firmly by the elbow. “This is not for me,” I hissed at her. “This is for Mr. Brisbane, of whom I need not remind you, you are inordinately fond.”

I struck a nerve there. Morag, with her common ways and her flinty heart, had formed an attachment to Brisbane. Perhaps it was the shared link of Scottish blood—or perhaps it was simply that he was a very easy man to idolize—but Morag adored him. She insisted upon referring to him as the master and had taken it upon herself to do his mending, as well as my own. I had little doubt she liked him more than she did me, and the disloyalty rankled, but only a bit. The truth was she had been somewhat easier to live with since Brisbane had entered our lives. At least she was now occasionally in a tractable mood.

“Very well,” she said, rubbing at her arm. “I will do it, but only for the master. Still, it is a pretty state of affairs when a lady must lie to her own husband.”

She gave me a look of injured reproof and I pushed her. “Do not be absurd. I am not betraying him. But I fear he may be in trouble, and he will not confide in me. I must discover the truth on my own, and then I will be in a position to help him.”

To my astonishment, tears sprang to her eyes. She dashed them away with the back of her hand and before I could prepare myself, she dropped a kiss to my cheek. “Forgive me, my lady. I ought not to have thought you would ever be disloyal to the master.”

“Disloyal!” I scrubbed at my cheek. “Morag, could you possibly have a lower opinion of me?”

“Well, you did mean to sneak about like a common trollop,” she pointed out. “How was I to know you had no plans to meet a lover?”

She adopted an expression of wounded indignation and would have kissed me again, but I waved her off. “Oh, leave it,” I snapped at her. “I should have thought that after so many years together, you would know me better.”

Morag raised her chin with a sniff. “You’ve no call to be so high and mighty with me, my lady. Many a finer lady than you has been tempted from the path of righteousness.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “Have you been reading improving tracts again? I told you I will not have Evangelicalism in my house. You are free to practise whatever religion you like, but I will not be preached at like a Sunday mission,” I warned her.

She patted my hand. “I shall pray for you anyway, my lady. I shall ask God to give you a humble heart.”

I suppressed an oath and handed her the note I had prepared for Lady Mortlake. “Take this and do exactly as I have said. I will send further instructions by telegram when I have plotted my next move.”

Morag tucked the note into her sleeve and gave me an exaggerated wink. “I am your man,” she promised. “Where will you be whilst I am pretending to attend you at the Mortlakes’?”