Stolen Lives (The Alice Chronicles #3)

16

S ir Thomas thinks your delicacy may cause you to overlook Wat Meredith’s past,’ Alice says in the close warmth of the coach. The leather coach-leaves at the windows have been raised to allow the night breeze in, but now that the weather has turned sultry there is little air movement. Clouds obscure the moon, and apart from the swing of the lanterns up in front, it is dark within.

‘He overreaches himself. Is that what kept you so long?’

‘Partly.’

‘I was running out of courteous nothings to say to Tom. What did you reply?’

Alice cannot see Ursula’s face, only hear the slight edge in her voice, the upturn at the end of the question. ‘I told him it was none of my business and that he should speak with you.’

‘I am turning over in my mind whether as a Justice he is the correct person to make enquiries about Wat. He will have access to sources not available to the general run of persons.’

‘In Bristol?’

‘I conjecture that will be his initial objective.’ When Ursula is in nervous humour, Alice thinks, her language takes on a stiff formality. ‘It might be advisable that I apprise Sir Thomas of my knowledge of the connection between Luella’s father and Wat.’

‘I would, Ursula. He knows we know about Wat’s past. No, it’s nothing you said,’ Alice assures her friend. ‘It was me. When Lady Harcourt told us, you stared at her, but I looked at you. If it had been a complete surprise, I too would have looked at her.’

‘Such a little thing on which to base an assumption, Alice.’

‘Sir Thomas notices such things. Nutley has already made the connection between Goldwoode and Kemp, and it won’t take long to link Kemp with Wat, so I would tell Sir Thomas. It could be risky for Wat, but less risky than hiding the fact. And you could forewarn Wat as well.’

‘I know you wish me to speak to Wat, Alice, but I do not intend to intrude upon him when there is nothing more than conjecture in the case.’

‘But, Ursula—’

‘Who is to say Rupert told the truth in that conversation with Sir Thomas? Perhaps my husband spun the story to deter Sir Thomas from trying to poach Wat to his own service.’

‘It’s possible,’ Alice admits. ‘But Luella independently tells the same story.’ Stop there, don’t interfere, this is none of your business .

For a minute, there is silence, then, ‘There is something else,’ Ursula says. ‘It could be misread, but Wat absented himself from my meeting with Master Goldwoode that day.’

‘Oh.’ Alice can think of nothing to say.

‘And before you say it, I spoke to him. I taxed him with it and he said he forgot.’

‘He had a chute to see to, didn’t he? It was only going to take a few minutes, I thought.’

‘He did see to it. He didn’t return until late afternoon. By then, Master Goldwoode had left to go back to the inn. I was obliged to tell Wat I am disappointed in him. But it does not mean he did it deliberately.’

‘It’s all the more reason why Wat needs to know his past is being resurrected!’ Alice blurts.

‘Wat works for me,’ Ursula says and Alice knows she has gone too far. The warning is clear. Leave my people to me . In the dark, Alice feels Ursula’s hand come to rest on her arm. ‘I take into account what you said about weighing both sides of the story. The surest path to the truth will be by impartial enquiry. The truth, the whole truth. As Sir Thomas said, there will be court rolls; he can gain access.’

‘Have a care, Ursula, Sir Thomas is a subtle player.’ He is one of the last people Alice would consult on a delicate subject. That parting comment of his, Not yet, it isn’t . A threat if ever there was.

For some minutes a stiff silence separates them in the darkness. To rekindle their earlier ease, Alice tries a conversational tone. ‘I realised this evening that Sir Thomas has two strings to his bow.’

‘His bow?’

‘The Cupid variety. Clearly I am intended for Harold, but as the younger he cannot decently marry until his elder brother is suited.’

‘So who is Tom courting?’ Ursula asks. ‘I heard no mention.’

‘Oh, Ursula!’ Alice says with a laugh.

‘What?’

‘He toadies to you about the Poor House, how grateful he is to be involved.’

‘He shows much knowledge of the workings of construction.’

‘He professes a great fondness for music; in particular Master Byrd’s airs, which also happen to be your favourites.’

‘They are very well known.’

‘Indeed they are. So well-known that somehow Tom cannot remember a title like the ‘Duchess of Brunswick’s Toye’, which even I know! And then how subtly he drops hints about the swelling Harcourt riches!’

‘As if that mattered.’

‘I’m amazed he didn’t profess his love of embroidery!’

‘Now I know you’re not serious,’ Ursula reproves her.

‘I am serious when I say that while I am detained with the ingenuous Harold and his ingenious father, the comely Tom conducts you to your coach where your own attendants can see the two of you alone together. Perhaps he hopes rumour will do the rest.’

Ursula is dismissive. ‘It’s not as if I were an innocent maiden. And you read much into small things.’

‘Perhaps, but if I hadn’t pretended I was unused to wine and about to swoon, I dare say the rest of us would still have been indoors, giving Tom ample opportunity to declare himself. He didn’t fall upon you, by any chance?’

‘Certainly not!’

‘Go down on one knee?’

At last Ursula laughs. ‘Alice, Tom is young enough to be my son.’

‘Many women would view that as a boon!’

‘He would doubtless prefer to marry close to his own age, someone like you.’

‘Alas no, my heart is forever Harold’s!’

‘What I am saying is that Tom will wish to marry a younger woman.’

‘Yes, but I think you will agree, Ursula, that even Tom knows his wishes are the least of it.’

Ursula sighs. ‘In which case, like his father, I suppose Tom will marry for money and dally in the dairy.’

‘Oh!’ Alice’s head swings round in surprise. ‘You’ve heard that one too?’

‘Rupert used to take pleasure in telling me of Sir Thomas’s amours. It was his way of ensuring I knew he had his own.’

She has waited until she reckons everyone must be asleep. Most of the household servants have to be up betimes in the morning, so were already abed when she and Ursula arrived back from Woodley Court. What hours Ursula keeps she can only guess at. But in this wing of the house, Alice is fairly confident that her nocturnal foray will pass unnoticed.

With Sam fast asleep next to her, she cautiously pushes back the coverlet and slides her legs to the floor. She picks up her candle – wax candles in Ursula’s house, not mere rushlights – and slips open her chamber door. For several moments she listens. Only the creak of the house settling fractures the silence. She slides through the gap, testing each floorboard with a bare foot before trusting her weight to it. A slight waft lifts tendrils of her hair. It subsides as she draws the door to behind her, and the flame steadies. The glow reaches only a short distance along plastered walls and oaken floorboards. Beyond its scope, only the lesser darkness through the end window gives form to the long passage. Still testing each footfall, she makes her way the dozen or so paces to the chamber with the wide door. There she halts, an instinct beyond caution arguing the need to place her ear to the wood, hold her breath, listen. Her knowledge of Rupert Cazanove, cruel and unyielding, stalks the dark tunnels of her mind, testing her strength of purpose to enter what was his most personal domain. She chides herself for wild fancies, but the candle quivers in her hand. She tells herself no one can possibly be in there, but still she taps timidly on the door and waits. Nothing but the thump, thump of her heart. Taps again, harder. Still nothing.

Back along the passage Sam murmurs in his sleep, calling a word or two, unintelligible. She pauses, half-hoping he is awake, will need her. The house creaks again. To her heightened senses, the sound suggests footsteps approaching, and she would like nothing better than an excuse to return to her chamber.

But Sam makes no further sound. Alice takes a deep breath. Nothing so fearful as fear itself. Taking hold of the door handle she applies a small pressure. The door does not move. Pushes again. Surely after all this, surely it’s not locked? She pushes harder, and suddenly with a squeak that sounds like a shriek, it gives and she is in, turning to guide the door carefully to rest.

For a moment she stands, straining to see into the far corners, but they are beyond the reach of her candle. Only the great bedstead looms, a canopied hulk. The burst pillows and shredded sheets have been shrouded by some dark coverlet. The chaos of dismembered garments has been hurriedly coffined into drawers. Across the chamber the white glimmer of a sleeve dangles at waist height. Presumably it was Wat who shuttered the windows once he had cleared up, denying that lesser darkness that would hint now at the extent of the chamber, the location of furniture.

With an effort she takes one step, then another, away from the door and into the body of the chamber that was Rupert Cazanove’s. Somehow his presence lingers. The bed, she remembers Ursula telling her, is the very bed in which he died. The tang of pipe smoke persists in the air, mingling with the fustiness of unaired bedding. An oily aroma of wool mingles with bitter wormwood, enemy of moths. Underlying all, even now after months without occupation, the air carries a ghostly sourness of human habitation. None of this she noticed when she burst in here the other day to find Wat in despair. Alone in the dark now, Cazanove’s presence is more truly re-created through the odours inhabiting this closed space.

A creak as of strained bed ropes and she is rooted, cowering like a cornered rabbit for him to turn and see her…

She makes herself move to the nearest coffer, and puts the candlestick on the floor beside it. Carefully she raises the lid and rests it back against the wall. A methodical search; that is what she came for. Whatever shameful thing it is that still haunts Wat, all she knows is that she is looking for something written down. It is written. Cazanove most likely hid it in this room, the room that not one of the servants would willingly enter, and all would surely quit as soon as they could.

Breeches, stockings, a coat, sundry shoes, all have been thrown back in the coffer with no regard to pairing or folding. One by one she goes through every pocket, every lining, every slashed opening, searching with eyes and fingers for anything foreign to the garment. Even the cuffs of shirts she feels for the rustle of paper, and the shoes she checks for loose soles inside and out. Nothing. She does the same with the next coffer, examining and probing each item. She opens band-boxes, not to check the ruffs they were designed to contain, for all the ruffs were thrown out when the boxes were hurled across the chamber; instead she checks each box for secret openings, hollow spaces. The ruffs she scrutinises when she comes to them, shaking them hard, feeling into each intricate starched fold. Nothing.

She moves on and places her candle on the chest of drawers. She works from the top, pulling out each drawer, pushing everything in it to one side and then carefully sorting through each. More stockings, more shirts, sending up a stale waft as though resenting the intrusion. In among them are small items, kerchiefs, feathers, a shrivelled clove orange, unmatched gauntlets. One or two large rings roll around, and old, half-heeded stories of popes and poison prompt her to check these for movement of the stone on its shank. But no such ancient practices seem to have influenced Rupert Cazanove’s choice of adornment. The stones are just that – large, expensive jewels that shouted his wealth.

She checks all the drawers, feeling into their corners, holding the candle to peer underneath, pulling them out to look behind. Nothing. In the lowest drawer she finds one of the bed curtains that was dragged from its rail. Methodically she feels fabric and lining across its width and down its entire length, especially checking the hem at the lower edge for any concealments. Nothing.

After a good hour, she has been through every coffer, every drawer, and both night-tables in the chamber. She has looked everywhere she can think of, and doubt begins to assail her that she will find anything. Perhaps it never was written as Cazanove claimed; perhaps he simply tortured Wat with the threat, to keep him subservient.

And yet… there were those words for those who have eyes to see . There must be something, there must be.

In a last-ditch attempt, cringing and revolted, she brings herself to check the bed with its stale body fug, feeling the remains of the punctured pillows, the stabbed sheets, and all the way round and under the erupting mattress. The feathers, roused and floating, brush her face making her sneeze, and she halts stock still, listening for long seconds, before resuming her search. A feeling of desperation takes hold and she curses herself for bringing only one candle, finds fault with Wat for closing the shutters, wishes she had waited until daylight to make this search.

On round the chamber she moves, holding the flame close and checking every inch of the way, feeling and pressing around the moulded panelling in the vague hope of discovering a hidden switch, a sliding door, a priest hole. No, stop a moment, these are wild thoughts born of desperation, she realises. Rupert Cazanove was no secret papist. Rupert Cazanove’s ruling interest was Rupert Cazanove. And yet…

The door cut to match the sections of panelling alongside the fireplace is cunningly concealed. It would probably not be seen even in daylight unless one knew it was there. But as soon as she touches the panel she knows it is not fixed. Her hopes soar as it opens easily. To be dashed immediately by the faint fetid smell of a jakes. It persists in here, perhaps only because the air in the little room has been stagnant for so long, and clearly no one has scrubbed the place. The chamber, along with its closet, has likely been closed and forgotten since his death last year. The pot he used is still there, the urine long since dried to dark yellow dregs in its base. She backs out, glad to breathe relatively fresh air, and is about to move on when she pauses. She re-enters the closet and goes down on her knees, placing the candle on the floor. Each board lies flush with its neighbour, but she checks anyway, prodding the ends of each.

The loose board by the wall could be bypassed a dozen times, unlikely to be noticed because unlikely to be trodden on. Alice pulls the candle close and works to prise it up. She can get her nails into the gap, raising it a fraction but not enough to withdraw it. She tries the other end with similar lack of success. What she needs is some sort of slim tool. She takes up the candle and returns to the chamber where she opens one of the coffers again. Not there. The other? Roots around. She finds the shoe she seeks, and on the shoe the metal buckle. It is only sewn on, and taking hold she yanks it off and returns to the closet. It slides down as though made for the sliver of gap between the boards. Within seconds she has levered the board enough to get her fingers under it. She lifts it out and away.

The package is small, wrapped in a skin of soft leather. She reaches in and brings it to the light. It has not been here very long, no dust of years betrays prolonged storage. She unwraps the leather to reveal an assortment of letters and notes. She unfolds the top one and reads. The wife of a Justice in Sherborne, apparently, was indulging in dalliances, of a sort that a man in her husband’s position would fain conceal. Alice wonders how much he paid Rupert Cazanove to keep quiet. The next contains details of a man’s meetings with another man at a mollie-house, including a keyhole description of what they did there on one occasion. Wrapped within that is a letter from one of the men sending ‘this further sweetener’. So Rupert Cazanove was making regular fees out of the man’s forbidden preferences. Mostly it is men who are paying, or begging him to desist from ruining them with his demands for more. Not only men; one concerns a titled lady, and gives dates and names. She must have paid handsomely to hide the fact of her bigamy. So handsomely that in one of her letters she protests she can send no more without raising her husband’s suspicions, and instead offers her ‘virtue’. Alice imagines Cazanove’s horse-laugh on reading it. The collection of poisonous notes continues in this vein, documenting human failings transmuted into human misery, the alchemy of evil. Rupert Cazanove employed watchers to spy on people who could not afford to be found out, but could afford to pay.

The papers are either the watchers’ accounts written like reports, or letters from his victims, but part-way down she comes to a printed sheet. As she opens it up, the first thing that catches her eye is the name. She sits back against the wall and draws the candle closer. It is a news broadsheet, of the scurrilous type put about regularly in towns with the express aim of titillating the senses and persuading the gossip-hungry to pay a half-penny to wallow in thrilled horror at its account. As she reads, she knows it is just the sort of thing Rupert Cazanove would enjoy using to torment Wat. Like most such sheets, the facts are buried beneath a heavy-handed thirst for drama.