Almost a Gentleman (47 page)

"It's a terrible thing you're doing," she said slowly.

Trimble sneered. "You deserve it."

"I suppose I do," she answered. "Because you're quite right. I had no respect at all. I still don't. But I'll get down on my knees and beg you for Lord Granthorpe's life if you wish. And so will he."

He
was
an intelligent boy, she thought. For he'd quickly fallen to his knees beside her—a few inches closer to Lady Claringworth's cane. But he'd need to be a few inches closer still, which meant that she'd have to put on a very good show, in order to distract attention from him.

Well, actually there
were
a few things she wanted to say.

"It's a tragedy to lose a son," she began softly. "You know it is, Fanny, though you often forget that I lost one too, that terrible day.

"A terrible tragedy.
Two
terrible tragedies in one moment. But there was a
third
tragedy as well, Fanny. Think of it. Two women lost beloved sons and couldn't comfort each other. Couldn't help, couldn't even share a kind word. Things might have been different, you know, if we could have." She was astonished to feel a tear trickling down her face.

Phizz Marston never cried. And, except for a very few tears a week ago, Phoebe hadn't cried since the accident. But she was weeping now. Not for Bryan, or even for herself exactly. In some odd way she was crying for an officious old woman she'd always loathed.

"And now you want to cause another tragedy. You want Lord Linseley to lose his son, who he loves as much as we loved ours. When will it stop, Fanny? When will you understand that you can't cure loss with loss?"

Lady Claringworth stared ahead blankly: it was impossible to know what she was thinking. Trimble, of course, had quite enjoyed the spectacle—the tears especially. But Phoebe had meant every word. She'd almost forgotten that she'd had any ulterior motive for getting down on her knees.

But Alec hadn't forgotten. While Phoebe had monopolized the attention of their captors, he'd quietly laid hold of Lady Claringworth's cane. And now, in a quick, elegant arc, he moved its tip directly against her windpipe.

Trimble blinked.

"If you shoot me," Alec told him calmly, "the bullet's pressure will probably cause a spasm of my arm, pushing it upward in the direction of her cane, and strangling her as I die. You see, the velocity of the spasm of a dying man's muscle…"

"Oh do shut up," Trimble groaned.

"I beg your pardon, Your Grace." Alec gazed solemnly up at her with wide green eyes. "I wasn't brought up to treat the old and infirm with anything but respect. But I'm afraid that my current situation makes that rather impossible."

"What a lovely job of raising you your parents did, Alec," Phoebe murmured. "However this all ends, I'll be happy to have met you."

For it wasn't over. After all, Trimble still had a gun. And she recognized the expression on his face; she'd seen it often, across the gambling tables. It was how a man looked when he couldn't decide if he was facing a bluff.

He
might
still shoot Alec, she thought, if he decided that the boy had been bluffing. And for all she knew it
was
only a bluff, this business of a spasm of velocity, or the velocity of a spasm, or whatever it was he'd said.

The ill-assorted quartet in Phizz Marston's bedchamber stared at each other, frozen in their perilous tableau like courtiers in Sleeping Beauty's castle. Phoebe wondered what could break the spell.

She hadn't expected the fearful row that suddenly broke out downstairs. Mr. Stokes must have followed me here, she thought. Mr. Stokes or… someone. She heard a woman shouting. Kate. And now she could hear Admiral Wolfe as well.

Furniture was being smashed, vases were crashing. It was impossible to know who was winning.

Not that it would have mattered to the quartet in the bedchamber. Trimble still pointed his gun at Alec, and Alec still held the cane pressed against Lady Claringworth's throat.

The noise was abating somewhat downstairs. One side or another must have prevailed.

Lady Claringworth spoke in a shaking voice. "Put down the gun, Trimble. She's right. It can't go on forever."

"Sorry, my lady, but I can't agree. The boy's bluffing." He began to squeeze the trigger, when a shot rang out from the doorway. Trimble's gun fell to the floor, and bright red blood—like a Christmas poinsettia, Phoebe thought wildly, how tasteless—spouted from his shoulder.

Phoebe looked up in amazement. "Mr. Simms?"

He looked equally surprised, staring at the pistol in his hand as though he didn't know how it had gotten there. "I've never shot one before. It's the admiral's… I was hiding in the wine cellar, you see, until our friends arrived. And I knew the back way here, through the passageway that leads to the partition in your dressing room."

He leaned against the wall, his eyes rolling a bit. She ran to embrace him, to hold him steady. "I've been so frightened for you, Phoebe," he whispered.

And now here were John and Kate, Mr. Stokes and Mr. Andrewes. Evidently their side had won the battle—"Well, we had a hero of Trafalgar directing our strategy," a very disheveled, very exhilarated Lady Kate Beverredge explained. "Those footmen will never escape from the nautical knots the admiral made in your new curtain ropes, Phoebe."

"Here, Alec," the Admiral Wolfe called, "let's see how you've done tying up this fellow in Phoebe's curtains. And let's bandage his shoulder, too, with some of that lace."

The house would have to be redone again, Phoebe thought.

"But won't the police be coming?" she asked. "To investigate all this ruckus coming from my house?"

"They won't." Everyone turned to stare at Lady Claringworth in her armchair. Her voice trembled, but she spoke loudly enough. "I bribed the constabulary to ignore the sound of shots coming from this house tonight. Much as Lady Kate bribed the authorities a few years ago, to fabricate Henry's wife's death."

Kate cleared her throat. "There are a few irregularities about this case that I think we shall want to keep a secret amongst ourselves."

"But did you always know the truth then, Fanny?" Phoebe asked.

"Indeed I didn't. It was only after I'd hired a detective to try to trace the stolen jewels. I wanted them, you see, because Henry had bought them."

She loved him
, Phoebe thought. Fanny hadn't loved her son very wisely, but Phoebe knew she couldn't hate the old lady for that.

"I'll give you some of the jewels that are left," she said, "to remember him by."

"Well," she corrected herself, "those of them that I won't be selling in order to renovate this house once more."

"If I stay," she added wistfully.

She stared with wonder at the collection of people crowded pell-mell into what had recently been a dandy's exquisite bedchamber. What an ill-assorted group we are, she thought, as motley a collection as the characters in the Plough play—and just as deeply engaged in the struggle of life against death.

It was late; they were tired. If only, Phoebe and her friends agreed, they could just take their bows and go home. If only there weren't the nasty fact that murder had been attempted tonight—and had been attempted last week in Lincolnshire as well.

Yet even fastidious Mr. Simms had to agree that—given the un-orthodoxy of the situation—it might not be the wisest course of action to inform the police of tonight's events. There was, for example, the matter of Mr. Marston not legally existing—which might prove rather a disadvantage, Alec speculated, when calling upon the law. The circumstances of Phoebe's death might also be questioned.

They debated the situation's legality and morality, wondering just what
was
the proper punishment for an infirm old woman who'd been maddened by grief? And if none of them felt quite right about punishing Lady Claringworth, what did that mean about the servant who'd never learned to live except as a tool of his masters' warped desires? It looked rather as though Trimble might lose the use of that pistol hand anyway, the admiral observed. In the end, after freeing the men tied up downstairs, they sent the old lady and her head footman home together, to take care of each other—and perhaps to serve as each other's punishments.

It was almost four in the morning by then.

"We'd serve you breakfast," Phoebe said, "if there were any food in the kitchen."

Kate shook her head. "I want to go home and go to bed."

"Right you are, my lady," Mr. Stokes's yawn could have served as a landmark for travelers, so awesomely cavernous was it.

"You'll come back with Mr. Andrewes and me, won't you, Phoebe?" Mr. Simms said.

She smiled as she retied her cravat. "Well, it is where most of Mr. Marston's clothes are. And Marston's most at home where his clothes are."

If Marston was really what she wanted anymore.

"And will you go back to your hosts, Alec?" she asked.

"I'd rather not," he said. "I said I'd be going to my father's. They'd be surprised to see me turn up, and anyway, the young lady of the family…"

His boyish face so obviously bore the wounded look of "rejected suitor" that everyone tried to look quite solemn on his behalf.

"I'll walk to Upper Brook Street with you," Phoebe said, "and then I'll go to the Mr. Andrewes's."

Perhaps she wanted to stay with him a bit longer because they had risked their lives together. Or perhaps it made her feel a little closer to David. In any case, she didn't want to bid him farewell just yet.

They were the last people to leave the house in Brunswick Square. Phoebe locked the door behind her.

"It's hard to know what I'm locking in except a lot of broken pottery and torn upholstery," she said. "Or what I'm locking out, given what we've been through tonight."

He laughed, and his laugh turned into a massive yawn.

"Poor boy," she said, "you're more tired than you thought. Shall we hail that cab that's just come around the corner? It looks like it's going to stop nearby."

The cab stopped right in front of them, to let out a tall, weary-looking gentleman, who stared with astonishment at the two of them standing in the light of a street lamp. And then, as he registered Phoebe and Alec's equally incredulous stares, he began to laugh until his dark blue eyes grew moist.

"Is this some sort of dream?" he asked. "The two people I most love in the world together like this? I haven't somehow died on the road and gone to heaven, have I?"

David and his son exchanged a hug disguised as an awkward, half-embarrassed clap on the shoulder. Phoebe was amused by their mutual masculine reticence, and jealous as well. For
she
—who would have given him a proper hug—couldn't touch him at all, except for a handshake.

"And good morning to you, Mr. Marston."

He put enough warmth into the handshake to make her forget her jealousy. She forgot to take her hand out of his; both of them forgot that Alec was watching. For a timeless instant they simply clasped hands and gazed at each other in a most ungentlemanly fashion.

"Marry me," he said.

"With all my heart," she replied.

Laughing, they shook hands on it, in a completely gentlemanlike manner now. Each of them shook hands with Alec as well, receiving his congratulations.

"But what on earth has brought you two together like this?" David asked.

"Gambling." Alec said quickly. David raised his eyebrows.

"It's true," Phoebe said. "We became friends while playing for high stakes. Alec is a wonderful bluffer, you know." Which remark quite convulsed Alec with laughter, all the more to see his father so befuddled.

He turned now, in the direction of Upper Brook Street. "I'll just hurry on," he called, "and let the older generation follow."

How naturally tactful he was, Phoebe thought.

"He's a lovely young man, David," she said as they set off behind him. "You're right to be proud of him."

"We actually were just on our way back to your house," she added. "There's rather more to the story, of course. But it can wait until later."

"Well, I have a story, too," David said. "Rather an amusing one, about Lord Crashaw."

"It wasn't Crashaw," she said softly. "I learned that tonight."

He shrugged. "No, it wasn't. But it seems that my story can wait too. What's important is that you're safe."

She smiled up at him. There would be time for all the stories, but no story could be as important as the happiness she felt walking alongside him this morning, this first in a lifetime of mornings together.

The stories they'd tell each other would be complicated, ironic, compounded of the oddities of human nature in all its surprising twists of thwarted or satisfied desire. But what she felt right now was much simpler, and only needed the simplest of words to express it.

"I wasn't safe, but I am now. Let's go on home to bed, shall we, David?"