A Flaw in the Blood (22 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

H
E WAS WAITING FOR HER
when she entered the bed-chamber: hidden in the shadow between door and wall. She had no time to cry out—he thrust a wad of cotton, dipped in chloroform from her own supplies, against her nose and mouth. In his other hand he held her neck.

She might have kicked him—might have toppled the chair Patrick found on the floor—but the struggle was short and utterly silent. Von Stühlen won.

Later, she understood that they'd been careless: too driven by the scent of their elusive trail to have a thought for their own safety. Von Stühlen had arrived in Amorbach the previous night and learned immediately from the innkeeper—whom he'd known for years—that an Englishman and his manservant were lodged upstairs. He'd watched them leave for the Otterbachtal that morning. He'd watched them return. When Patrick made for the station and she chatted with the innkeeper's wife as she settled their bill, he'd prepared his strike.

When she regained consciousness, he was slapping her.

She tried to struggle upright, but her hands were bound behind her back. Her mouth was gagged. She was lying prone, on the bench seat of a traveling coach. She stared at von Stühlen, whose head loomed over her, his face expressionless; his hand clenched, and he slapped her again, deliberately. Her gorge rose—chloroform always made her sick—and she knew that she would choke.

She rolled sideways, head hanging over the seat, gagging wretchedly. He tore at the knot he'd made at the base of her skull and she puked all over his boots.

She cleaned them with a shaving towel herself, while von Stühlen held his dueling pistol to her head. When he was satisfied with her work, he handed the boots to his valet—a broad-shouldered prizefighter of a man, who sat beside him in the coach, grinning at her stupidly.

“We'll have to change carriages,” von Stühlen observed, rolling down the side windows. “The place stinks like an abattoir. Tell me, Miss Armistead—why did you come all the way to Amorbach in a servant's clothes? You're an insult to womanhood.”

Georgiana said nothing. She was bent slightly forward on the seat, her hands tied once more behind her back.

“Heinrich, I can't stand to look at her,” von Stühlen said conversationally. “Something must be done. Take off her clothes, there's a good chap.”

She definitely kicked him this time—viciously, on the shin—but with a deft movement von Stühlen clasped her knees together and put all his weight on them. The valet started with her coat—dragging it down over her shoulders until it snarled on her bonds—and then ripped her shirt from neck to waist. She had bound her breasts flat with strips of cloth.

The two men stared at her bandaged chest. Then von Stühlen reached for his knife.

It took Fitzgerald a good quarter-hour to decipher what the innkeeper's wife had seen. Her French was heavily accented and he didn't speak the language anyway; it was mostly guesswork, with her husband interjecting a word or two of German unhelpfully along the way. His manservant George had been carried, drunk as a lord, from the inn after settling their bill—and gone off with his new friends in a carriage, rather than a train.

However vague the details, von Stühlen's name was unmistakable.

“Direction?” Fitzgerald demanded.

“À l'ouest,”
said the innkeeper's wife.
“À Mayence, peut-être.”

Mainz. He had a railway ticket in his pocket, but von Stühlen was traveling fast, perhaps a half-hour ahead of him; he could not lose time on the agonising local train. Not when Georgiana was in the Count's hands. How had she said he earned his dreadful reputation? —
For raping the unwilling.

“I need a horse,” he told the innkeeper's wife.
“Un cheval. Vite!”

It was another twenty minutes before he clattered out of the stable on a nag he'd promised to leave in Mainz—and his purse was almost empty.

“Why are you doing this to me?” Georgiana demanded. “Because I laughed in your face at Ascot? Are you so thin-skinned?”

He had chloroformed her again at dusk when they pulled into the yard behind the small woodside tavern. The handkerchief terrified her, because von Stühlen had no medical knowledge at all; he thought of the drug as a means of control, while she recognised it as a source of death.

She did awake, however, in a tavern bedchamber—her wrists and ankles tied to the bedposts, her legs spread-eagled on the frame. She was completely naked, and the world outside the single narrow window had gone completely dark. The German Count was sitting in a chair in the corner, smoking one of his cigars. She felt the familiar nausea rise and willed herself not to be sick, to steady her whirling head.

Imagine he's a doctor,
she told herself.
Imagine this is a medical examination.

“Thin-skinned?” he repeated. “You exaggerate your individual importance, I'm afraid. Women, you know, will always be interchangeable; like horses, some of you boast better blood or better lines—but you're fundamentally there to be
ridden.
When you, Miss Armistead, chose to ridicule me in the face of the world—the equation changed.” He withdrew his cigar and examined it. “A horse that tosses his rider is first broken to bridle—then
sold.
”

Georgiana stared fixedly at the ceiling, her teeth clenched against her fear. It was possible Patrick was following them. It was possible she would be saved.

The door to the room opened a crack, and von Stühlen's valet slipped inside. The Count asked him something in German; the man replied in the negative.

They're watching for him,
she thought.
I'm the trap.
And willed Patrick not to come.

“Heinrich has never enjoyed a woman of your quality,” von Stühlen observed. “I've told him you're no virgin, of course, but he's pathetically eager to experience your charms.”

The valet was already kicking off his boots.

“What do you want to know?” Georgiana asked desperately. Trying to buy time. “Why have you come all the way across Europe, after me? Not because of Ascot. Even I don't believe that.”

“It hardly matters.” Von Stühlen studied the end of his cigar with his good eye; he was smiling faintly. “You're an abortionist, my dear. And your last patient died at your hands. Lizzie, her name was.”

“That's a lie!” she spat. “Lizzie was murdered—but not by me. The poor girl was smothered with a pillow. Did you order it?”

“That's a double murder charge under the Offences Against the Person Act,” he continued, as though she hadn't spoken. “—An Act just passed by Parliament this year. Abortion is noted in section fifty-eight. But perhaps you don't follow legislation as closely as you do your prostitutes.”

Heinrich clambered into the bed, and straddled her pinioned body.

“What do you want to know?” she gasped.

“Don't worry,” von Stühlen said soothingly. “You'll tell me everything you can think of. Heinrich will make sure of that.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

T
HE MAN SHAKING OUT THE
drugget on the area steps moved with a certain painful hesitation, as though his muscles were sore from overuse. He winced slightly as his hands rose and fell, a cloud of dust billowing from the length of carpet; and then, abruptly, his arms dropped and he turned away from the January morning, the fog that flowed down the steps like a predatory snake. The carpet hung disconsolately at his side; he kept his eyes fixed on the ground. There was a fire in the kitchen hearth, and he was in a hurry to get back to it.

He'd been a cheerful enough fellow before his master turned murderer, the Bobby thought as he strode past Patrick Fitzgerald's doorstep. Bedford Square was the Bobby's route, and often were the times he'd traded gibes with Gibbon. But guilt could do that to a man—rob him of all the joy of living. The valet knew more'n he would say. A prisoner in his own few rooms, he was; a goat tethered for the kill. He knew the police were watching him. Never went out anymore, for all he lived so lonesome, except to buy the odd egg and rashers. Never talked to the neighbours, though some said he'd been sweet on the housemaid four doors down, before everything happened. Waiting, that's what he was—waiting for Fitzgerald to show himself. They were all waiting. Gibbon's return had got the Law's hopes right up. But the man had been back four days now, and no sign of the master.

The Bobby sighed as he went his monotonous way, longing for a sit-down by the fire himself.

The men at the Nice gendarmerie were content to let him die. Rokeby had said that was nonsense, and sent a military surgeon of his acquaintance to salve and bind Gibbon's wounds. The pain, at first, made him faint every time he moved, and a fever set in; but by the second morning, when Rokeby reappeared in his prison cell, he was able to sit up unaided.

“I've told the gendarmes to let you go,” the consul said. “Whatever your master may have done, it's clear you had no part in it—if you had, you'd have screamed it to the heavens when von Stühlen whipped you. There's no shame in that,” he added hurriedly. “You were served with excessive violence—I may even say, out of all proportion to the cause. Have you enough money for your journey home?”

Perhaps it was guilt that motivated the consul's kindness, or a desire to be rid of an embarrassing episode. Whatever the cause, Gibbon's clothes were returned and his seat purchased on the public stage to Toulon.

He landed at Dover on the first day of the New Year.

The Bobby was right: Gibbon knew the Law was watching him. He'd been met at the packet by a pair of detectives Rokeby had wired from Nice, who escorted him to what they called Scotland Yard—the Metropolitan Police headquarters. There, the same old ground was gone over at the direction of a detective chief inspector. Gibbon told them how his master had found Septimus Taylor attacked in chambers, the day after the Consort's death, and called for a doctor to save him. He explained how he, Gibbon, had watched young Theo escort Lady Maude on the road to Sheerness, as Fitzgerald turned for a boat in the opposite direction. He told them, moreover, how Wolfgang, Graf von Stühlen—who claimed to have discovered Theo's body—had pursued them all the way to Cannes.
A zeal for justice,
the detective chief inspector murmured. In answer, Gibbon showed him the wounds on his back.

The police shrugged, but declined to throw him into Newgate. They conducted him instead to Bedford Square. Fitzgerald's house had been thoroughly searched before—for what, Gibbon was never sure. They left the valet in possession of their mess, with a warning that he was not under any circumstances to flee London. If his master returned, he was to inform them immediately—on pain of conspiracy charges.

He settled in, as they expected, to wait. Fitzgerald would undoubtedly come back; and it was Gibbon's job to make sure he ran well clear of the Law. He had identified three of the men who watched his days by the end of the first thirty-six hours; loiterers near a flaming ash can, who took the job in shifts. They hovered near the gated entrance to Bedford Square. The mews behind the house had only one watcher: a gent in a greatcoat, who lounged aimlessly near the neighbour's coach house, blowing on his fingers in the bitter January cold.

Gibbon developed a routine to pass the time. Fires in the principal hearths at seven A.M., so the damp did not penetrate the deserted rooms. Tidying of the kitchen and scullery by eight. Slicing and ironing of the newspaper, as though Fitzgerald might require it. General housework and thorough cleaning, such as he rarely found the time to do when Fitzgerald was in residence. An hour with the newspaper over his dinner, which he took at two o'clock when left to his own devices; and the luxury of a pipe to follow. Silver polishing in the afternoon, and assessment of his master's wardrobe—what could be mended, what must be brushed and pressed, what given away to the rag-and-bone men who loitered in the mews. Supper he took in a local pub: a simple affair of bubble and squeak, or bangers and mash, washed down with the publican's porter. A watchful stroll around the square—if Fitzgerald made contact, it would probably be at night—and the throwing of the bolts before an early bed.

He managed the household accounts carefully from the strongbox he stored under his floorboards. They had left London near the end of the previous month, and Fitzgerald's January wages and domestic cash were sorely lacking. Gibbon had a bit put by, however—the steady savings for his old age—and he was not beyond tapping it if Fitzgerald's absence was prolonged. Tradesmen's bills were a nagging worry: If demands proved exorbitant, he would have to consider shutting up the house by the end of the month, and lodging with his sister near the Elephant and Castle. This weighed on Gibbon's mind; how would Fitzgerald find him if he vanished from Bedford Square?

On the morning of January second, however, a new interest appeared to divert his mind.

He had taken to scanning the
Personal
column in the London
Times
while he dined. Quite often the notices were perfunctory, but sometimes they were amusing.

MISS KILDARE'S RESPECTS TO MR. TIMMONS, WITH HER REQUEST THAT HE RETURN, PRIOR TO HIS WEDDING DAY, THE CORRESPONDENCE SHE SO FAITHFULLY CONDUCTED OVER THE COURSE OF THE PAST FIVE YEARS; ALL REPLIES TO BE SENT 25, GRACECHURCH STREET, LONDON. . . .

A WALLET OF MONEY, AND THE DOCUMENTS CONTAINED THEREIN, SUBSCRIBED MR. A—— PR——, MISLAID WHILE THE OWNER WAS ENGAGED UPSTAIRS AT THE SIGN OF THE LUCKY PENNY: REPLIES TO MRS. BARNACLE, PROPRIETRESS. . . .

He could perfectly envision Mrs. Barnacle, who undoubtedly kept a bawdy house, and would make the discomfitted Arthur Protheroe pay for the return of his property—if she did not blackmail him for the remainder of his useless existence; and Miss Kildare, who had hoped in vain for an offer from her young man, only to read the announcement of his engagement in that selfsame
Times
. . .

He never expected to read the name of someone he knew.

PRIVATE COMMUNICATION TO DR. ARMISTEAD . . .

A brief notice, without the slightest hint of its author's identity. Replies must be sent to the postal office, Cowes, to be left until called for.

It worried Gibbon that this plea—so oblique, but potentially so important—should go unanswered. Worry nipped at his heels all day, as he shook carpets in the area and ignored the gaze of the local Bobby.

That evening, after his stroll around the square, he sat down at Fitzgerald's desk—and composed his careful letter.