A Broken Vessel (35 page)

Sally could hardly eat a bite of supper. Mrs. Mabbitt declared she was making her giddy, jumping up to look out the window every moment. “You know what they say about a watched pot,” she warned.

“They’ll be back any time now, won’t they?” asked Sally eagerly. “It’s nigh to seven o’clock.”

“Oh, you know what coach travel’s like. So many things can go wrong on the road—horses casting a shoe, poles splintering, wheels coming off. It wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t get home till the small hours.”

Sally stared in dismay.

Mrs. Mabbitt smiled. “You’ve never coached any great distance, I can see.”

“No,” mourned Sally, dropping into her chair.

“There’s nothing to worrit yourself about. They’ll come back safe and sound. It just might take a bit of time, that’s all.”

But I’ve no time to spare! thought Sally.

All evening she hovered at the kitchen window, pressing her face to the glass whenever she heard carriage wheels. Eight o’clock went by, then nine, and still the travellers had not returned.

Mrs. Mabbitt put her sewing away, saying she was feeling peepy and wanted her bed. The hands of the clock crept round to half past nine. Sally got up purposefully and went to her room to change her clothes. Mr. Kestrel and Dipper were not back—so be it. The rendezvous was all arranged; she could not throw away this chance to find out from which man she had gotten the letter. She would just have to go alone.

CHAPTER
25

S
ally dug out one of her old gowns, made of pink silk, with green bows at the neck and a big green flounce around the bottom. She could not go to the Cockerel in the prim, poky clothes Mrs. Mabbitt made her wear. Her old friends there would hardly recognize her, and the man she was meeting might be suspicious. She bound up her back hair more securely, then spat on her fingers and slicked her front hair into tighter curls. Tying on her widebrimmed, red-feathered bonnet, she beamed at herself in the glass. Now, that was something like!

She struggled through yet another note, explaining where she had gone, and why. Hastening upstairs, she propped it on the mantelpiece in Mr. Kestrel’s front parlour. Glancing at the clock, she saw that it was a quarter to ten. She flung on her cloak and ran out.

Piccadilly was clogged with traffic, as always. She would move fastest on foot. She wove, edged, and shoved her way along the pavement, till at last she reached the Haymarket. Leaving the
gaslit thoroughfare behind her, she darted down the little dark street where the Cockerel was.

The taproom was crowded tonight. She was glad—the more people around her, the safer she would feel. She scanned the room, her heart thumping fast. The customers were the usual types: broken-down boxers, decaying actors, bawdy-house bullies, and whores. She had no trouble picking out the man she had come to meet. He looked as out of place among this lot as a peacock in a chicken-yard. Charles Avondale.

He was pacing restlessly back and forth, as well as he could in such a small, crowded space. When he caught sight of Sally, he frowned as if trying to place her. She grinned and dropped a curtsy.

Recognition dawned in his eyes. He made his way toward her, staring in amazement. “You!”

“’Course it’s me! Who’d you expect?”

“I didn’t know who or what the plague to expect!”

“Well, you must’ve knowed it was me as pinched your letter.”

A feverish light sprang up in his eyes. He caught her arm. “Have you got it with you?”

“No.” For the first time, she was a little frightened. She had told herself no man in his right senses would harm her in a public place like this. But was Avondale in his right senses? “You’re hurting me arm,” she complained.

He let her go and took a few long, struggling breaths. “You want money. Of course. Come, we’ll sit down there and talk.” He pointed to a table in the corner.

“You has to stand us a drop, or Toby’ll cut up rusty.”

“All right. What will you have?”

“White satin.”

She secured the corner table while he went to the bar. He brought back a glass of gin for her and a pint-pot for himself. She lifted her glass convivially, but he did not notice. He was glancing uneasily around the taproom.

“What you looking for?” she asked.

“I have a feeling I was followed here. But it’s probably all my fancy.” He laughed mirthlessly. “I often have that feeling these days.”

He took a few gulps of ale. She watched him, thinking: So it’s him I pinched the letter from. So Mary must’ve been this Rosemary of his, and most likely it was him as croaked her. But why? And who’s that gal Megan MacGowan?

“All right,” he said. “Let’s talk business. How much do you want for the letter?”

“I ain’t made up me mind,” she stalled. “I’d like to know a bit more about it first. Otherwise, how’ll I know how much to ask for it?”

“You can’t think I’m going to tell you about the letter? As far as I’m concerned, the less you know about it, the better.”

“Oh, if that’s how you feel—” She shrugged and stood up.

His left hand shot out and grabbed her wrist.

“Sit down!” he hissed.

“Why should I?”

“Because I’m pointing a pistol straight at your heart, and if you don’t sit down, I’ll kill you.”

Her eyes dropped to his right hand, which was thrust into his greatcoat pocket. He drew it out for a moment, showing her a wicked little pocket pistol. It was double-barrelled, which meant he could even afford to miss her once.

“You’re faking,” she stammered. “You’d never pop me in front of all these people.”

“Wouldn’t I?” His grip on her wrist tightened painfully. The skull ring he wore on his little finger glinted in the candlelight. “I’ve been through hell on account of that letter and everything it signifies. That it’s a hell partly of my own making doesn’t make it any easier! A few years ago, I trifled with a woman—I made a rash promise I never meant to keep. God knows, it was wrong, but hundreds of fellows like me have done the same, and they haven’t been cursed with the consequences I have. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to get that letter back. I’ve dug myself so deep into the pit that I don’t care a damn what I do now, or how
far I go, or whether I drag you down with me. So for the last time, sit down, and name your price!”

She sank slowly into her chair. She could not doubt he was in deadly earnest. What should she do? To give up the letter to him was out of the question. She and Mr. Kestrel had agreed they would not part with it. Even if she were willing to hand it over, they would have to go to Clarges Street to get it, and that would alert Avondale that Mr. Kestrel and Dipper were involved in this. She could not split on her friends. No, she would have to find her own way out of this coil.

She looked around wildly for someone or something to assist her. What she saw, incredibly, was Matthew Fiske coming toward them, kneading his hat between his hands. What was he doing here? Did he know something about the letter, after all? Or was he still trying to warn her off?

“What do you want?” said Avondale sharply, keeping a firm grip on Sally’s wrist.

Fiske looked from him to Sally. “I came in answer to your note.”

“What note?” Avondale rounded on her. “Is this fellow in league with you? Shall I have to pay him, too?”

“Pay me?” said Fiske. “I don’t understand you, sir. I came to see this young woman about—about a private matter.”

“Well, you can’t see her now. She’s with me at the moment. So have the goodness to take yourself off.”

“You’d best do like he says, Bristles,” Sally sighed. “He ain’t one to take no for an answer.”

“But—but what about the letter?” faltered Fiske.

“What the plague does
he
know about my letter?” Avondale demanded.

“He don’t know nothing about it,” said Sally. After all, why should poor Bristles get mixed up in this? “I thought he did at first, but now I knows it was you I pinched it from.”

Avondale stared. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“The letter!” she said impatiently. “The one I pinched from your pocket while we was having a ride that night.”

“From
my
pocket! My God, do you think if I’d had the letter I’d be carrying it about for you to lay hands on? Don’t you think I’d have destroyed it the moment I had the chance?”

“But—” She broke off. Light began to dawn. “This letter you’re after, was it wrote by a gal as lost her character, and was asking somebody in her family to take her back?”

“The devil it was! It was
my
letter, I wrote it! You’re trying to confuse me, but it won’t work. I won’t be led a dance!” The nose of the pistol rose warningly.

“Don’t you understand?” she urged. “It’s two different letters! The one I have ain’t the one you want. The night I picked you up, I picked him up afore you” —she nodded at Fiske—“and another cove after. I pinched a letter from one of you, but I didn’t know which, so I wrote to all three of you asking you to meet me here, to see which one would show. And two of you did, but
you’ve
found a mare’s nest. It ain’t your letter. You understand?”

It was nearly midnight by the time Julian and Dipper got home. Julian sent Dipper downstairs to fetch a container of whitewash and a brush from the hall cupboard. He himself went to the pianoforte and pressed a hidden spring. A panel flew open, revealing a small compartment. He took out Mary’s letter. Spreading out an old
Morning Chronicle
on a table, he laid the letter on it, face down. Then he lit an Argand lamp, turning up the wick to make it burn as brightly as possible.

When Dipper returned with the whitewash, Julian opened the container and dipped the brush in. “I wonder I didn’t think of this before. We knew Mary had used a second sheet of paper as a makeshift envelope. And we knew her pencil-point had grown dull as she wrote, till she had to bear down very hard. If the address was the last thing she wrote—which stands to reason, since she had to finish the letter before she could wrap it in the outer sheet—perhaps we can conjure up the ghost of the address.”

He painted a gossamer-thin coat of whitewash across the back of the letter. Then he held it up to the light, slanting it to see its surface in relief. In the middle of the sheet were faint impressions of written words, the whitewash coating the indentations:
Lord Braxton, Braxton Castle, Shropshire
.

Julian put the letter down slowly. “And to think we joked about it as the Braxton disaster. And we had no idea.”

“Lord Braxton—he’s the cove as invited all the nobs to his castle, then put a stopper on it when his daughter run off to France with a half-pay captain.”

“Not
with
him,
to
him. Captain Hartwell was already in France—he’d done a moonlit flit on account of his debts. Lady Lucinda ran away to join him—and we know now she never arrived. She’s buried in a pauper’s grave, branded a prostitute and a suicide.”

“You think she was nabbed by the trepanners, sir?”

“It seems the most likely explanation, doesn’t it? She was travelling alone, and almost certainly didn’t go by her real name. She may well have seemed like a nobody—genteel but poor, without connexions. She wasn’t out yet, so the world didn’t know her, and she didn’t know the world. She could easily have been entrapped by someone like Mme. Leclerc. She hasn’t been missed, because she’s presumed to have joined her lover on the Continent, and her father is in too much of a temper to write to her or try to find her. Captain Hartwell may not have known she was coming, and even if he did, he can’t return to England to look for her without his creditors arresting him for debt.”

He turned the letter over and scanned its contents. “Read in that light, everything she wrote makes sense.
I do not think I could face anyone I know, ever again—not you, nor anyone else in our family, nor him I once thought I loved.
The ‘you’ is Lord Braxton, and ‘him I once thought I loved’ is Captain Hartwell. The ‘stupid, stubborn ungrateful rashness’ she repents is her running away to marry the captain against her father’s wishes. And, of course, ‘My ruin has not been all my fault’ would refer to Smith and Company.