Angel of Hever Castle, The (2 page)

Ah, b
ut I can easily imagine his whole pattern
, Trevor thought. 
He has undoubtedly gone from girl to girl for years, declaring each one to be his muse.  Muse.  That’s a proper load of rubbish.  They’re more likely meant for his amusement, I should think.  He seduces and then abandons them and the girls either disappear from society entirely or their parents go to great lengths to hide their disgrace.  Thus his victims collude to conceal his true nature, and that’s how the wretch has continued to get commissions to paint the daughters of London’s better families. 

Whe
n Trevor pulled away from his thoughts, Tess was looking hopefully at the settee where he and Rayley were sitting.  “You shall help me?  It shouldn’t be more than two or three days of inconvenience.  Just long enough to ensure my daughter is well.”

“I like the idea,” Rayley said.

“I don’t,” Trevor said, with a snort.  “You wish us to put on painter’s smocks and cavort around the snowy countryside stealing food like a bunch of gypsies?”

“Don’t be silly, Trevor,”
Geraldine said.  “It hasn’t snowed all season.”

“And we must do something,” Emma said, her own tone as sharp as Geraldine’s was mild.  “Men who prey on women
cannot be allowed…” Her voice trailed off and she jerked her small pale chin, using both hands to push her hair from her face.  Everyone in the room knew what Emma was thinking about – her sister Mary, who had been the last victim of Jack the Ripper.  While LaRusse was no Ripper, Trevor silently conceded that Emma had a point.  Threats to young women lurked everywhere and, having failed to capture Jack, Trevor supposed that he and his team were doomed to chase his shadow for the rest of their careers.

“
Think of it as one of our experiments, Welles,” Rayley said.  “You and I were bemoaning just last week, were we not, that neither of us has ever had the slightest experience in working undercover or assuming a false identity?   This is our perfect chance.”

“What I recall about last week’s
discussion of the matter,” Trevor said drily, “is that we mocked those officers who were so eager to play charades.  That we compared them to children at a masquerade party.”

It was true.  He and Rayley had laughed uproariously at a photograph of the celebrated Murder Squad of Scotland Yard, all of whom had embraced the mania for
investigative disguise with a passion.  In the photograph, the eight detectives had sat proudly posed in the costumes they had created for their undercover work: Cat whiskers and eyepatches and uneven boots designed to give them a ludicrously exaggerated limp.  These so-called disguises, Rayley and Trevor had concluded, had the primary effect of making sure everyone you passed in the street stopped and stared.  Thus they were abject failures when it came to the true goal of undercover work, which was to blend in, to do nothing to draw the eye.

“I agree with yo
u that costumes and props can quickly become foolish,” Rayley said, “but we are not gluing on a set of whiskers, we are affecting an entire new identity.  It strikes me as a marvelous challenge, right up there with mastering the latest forensic techniques.  And, just as Mrs. Arborton says, the task shouldn’t be difficult.   Who knows, the luster may have worn off the adventure already for Anne, and we may easily be able to persuade her to return to London with us.  We shall be back by Christmas, I have no doubt of it.”

Tess smiled
.  “This is exactly what I hoped you would say.”  Then she hesitated.  “I have brought one other thing,” she said.  “It was left in Anne’s room and it shows, I believe, the ultimate use LaRusse intends for her, as his muse…and as his…I left it by the door as I came in.”

“I shall get it,” Emma said, spr
inging to her feet and thinking that if she was unable to travel to Hever, which sounded quite glamorous, at least she could do research back in London.  If LaRusse made a habit of seducing his portrait models, there were probably any number of other ruined lives in his wake, for it was Emma’s experience that men who enjoyed debasing women, rarely stopped with debasing merely one. 
Who knows
, she thought as she approached the cloakroom,
there may be more pieces of the story lurking here in London than out in the farmlands of Kent.

She quickly found the package Tess must have meant and returned to the drawing room with a tube in her hand,
a long thin affair of the sort an architect might use to transport his drawings.  She handed it to Tess, who withdrew a rolled paper from its depths and then suddenly looked around the circle and said “Must I be here for this part?”

“Of
course not, darling,” said Geraldine.  “But I insist you stay for supper.  Come, let us go tell Gage to lay another plate and as we dine we shall conspire, all of us, to create the identities Rayley and Trevor shall assume for their journey.”

“Poor Gage,” Tess murmured but she obediently got to her feet.  “It seems he must do everything around here.”

“We’ve tried a number of maids but no one suits him,” Geraldine said.  “He is horribly shy, you know.  I think it’s the goiter.  He thinks people are staring at him, which, of course, they are…”

The two older women disappeared
from the room and Trevor, Rayley, and Emma waited for their voices to fade.  Once they were sure Tess was truly gone, they pulled the paper from its tube and unrolled it on a table top then stood, shoulder to shoulder, gazing down at the image found there. 

It was a ha
lf-done sketch, showing the skill of the artist, just as Tess had claimed.  But this was no ordinary portrait.  A wide-eyed girl, evidently Anne Arborton, was seated on a rock gazing out at the viewer.  Her gown had slipped from one shoulder, exposing a young and perfectly round breast.  Over the other shoulder was the image of a faraway castle, perched on a hill.  And printed at the top of the drawing was the title: 
The Angel of Hever Castle.

“So he’s already had her,” Emma said, turning away from the table in disgust.  “The girl’s future is ruined.”

“Not necessarily,” Rayley said.  “Painters must use live models for their nudes and those models must come from somewhere.  Say what you wish about LaRusse, even this rough sketch shows he has talent.  It is artistic in its composition, is it not?”

“Perhaps so, but t
his isn’t art,” Trevor said, with resignation, for he hated winter travel.  “It is someone’s daughter.”

Chapter Two

The countryside of Kent
was largely composed of the last lingering remains of hops fields and apple orchards, as well as being clotted with sheep.  As they rode, Trevor reached over and pulled a wayward apple from one of the trees and was surprised to find it still firm and relatively tasty, although the sweetness of the harvest season had long passed.  Geraldine was right; the autumn of 1889 had brought a strangely extended expanse of fair weather, and he was relieved to note that no clouds were approaching from any direction.

The sights
, sounds, and smells of the farmland felt like a homecoming to Trevor, although he noticed with wry amusement that Rayley, who had been raised in the city, had crinkled his nose at the first whiff of the dung piles and had resolutely adjusted his scarf to cover his nostrils and mouth.  Trevor had done precisely the same thing years ago, when he had first encountered the smokestacks of London.

Within Scotland Yard, Trevor suspected that he and Rayley were often seen as
twin halves of the same person – outcasts from the ranks of their fellow detectives based largely on their shared belief that forensics, not deduction, was the future of criminology . They were striving to be modern men in an antiquated system, constantly running headlong into the blockades of traditionalists, and their struggles had hastened the growth of their friendship.  But it was times like this – one of them crunching apples and reveling in the country air while the other stayed tight and bundled on his horse, regarding every sheep with suspicion – that Trevor remembered how different they truly were. 

The afternoon before the two men had taken the rail
to Edenbridge, the closest village to Hever, and had then spent an agreeable evening at the town’s only pub, which was located on the ground floor of the town’s only inn.  They had been joined in their dinner by the Edenbridge constable, a ruddy-faced bloke named Billy Brown.  Rural policemen often resented the interference of outsiders in local matters, and were more apt to be dismissive than impressed when that interference came under the auspices of Scotland Yard.  But Brown had welcomed them literally with open arms, smacking each man’s back heartily in greeting.   He seemed relieved that someone, somewhere, had taken an interest in the matter, and it was clear that what he called “those bloody shenanigans” at Hever Castle had rankled him for some time.

“It’s not strictly under my jurisdiction, mind you,” he had said, an
d then he had blown decisively on the foaming top of his pint.  “Properties of the Crown stand apart from all that.  But crimes are being committed within those noble walls both left and right, make no mistake.”

“We’re not here to clean up the place,”
Trevor had reminded him.  “More to rescue one particular girl, even though there is not the slightest evidence the child wants to be rescued.  Presumably Anne Arborton is not being held against her will by LaRusse Chapman but is instead following him eagerly.  That is why we cannot enter the gates as lawmen, but rather taking the form of fellow bohemians, a task I suspect Detective Abrams will be able to manage more convincingly than myself.”

Rayley
had smiled at this insult-inside-a-compliment and had taken a swig of his own ale, then winced. Country stuff, probably brewed no more than a stone’s throw away from the inn where they now sat, far stronger and more bitter than what the pubs served in London.  “I wonder if they will accept us as freely as Mrs. Arborton predicted.”

“Bring food,”
Brown had advised with a growl.  “And then they will accept you freely enough.  I gather that they are all but starving out there.”

And so Rayley and Trevor now journeyed laden down with every sort of foodstuff the shops of
Edenbridge could offer.   Bread, cheese, tea, ham, a jug of ale, and jars of jam, all rattling in their sacks along with brushes, paints, and the sticks of am unassembled easel.  The painting tools had been borrowed from Geraldine, who was an enthusiastic but somewhat mercurial hobbyist.  She had done a bit of everything at one time or another, including landscapes, and it had been decided that Rayley would pose as a painter.   He had no particular abilities in that direction, but he did have the thin, serious face which the profession seemed to require, and Geraldine has assured him that if he claimed to paint “in the modern style” he could swipe colors on the canvas with abandon and no one was likely to detect his utter lack of talent.

Trevor, in contrast, was masquerading as a poet, which meant that the only supplies he required was his little leather notebook and pen
cil, two items which were rarely out of his grasp anyway.  He was convinced that his rapid rise at Scotland Yard was due to his insistence on taking copious notes at every crime scene and interview, and he supposed that when a man is scribbling away in a notebook it is impossible for an outsider to tell if he is creating a poem or constructing an accusation of murder.  Still, he felt oddly fretful as he tossed the apple core aside and shifted his weight on the horse.  Rayley noted his notable sigh and turned from his own horse.

“Steady on, We
lles.  It is only the twentieth of the month and I wager we will be back at Gerry’s table before you know it, sampling her fine holiday lamb.  Or is Gage serving goose this year?”

“It’s not that.  I’m just unsure if I can truly pass as a poet.”

“Well, it’s not as if anyone actually knows what a poet looks like, is it?” Rayley asked amiably.  “So that much should work in your favor.  Ah, look there, Welles, for it would seem we have found ourselves already at Hever.”

They had just crested a small hill and now were poised looking down on
a lush meadow, with patches of green still evident here and there across the brown and grey.  At the bottom of the hill lay Hever Castle.  Emma had described it as a small one – insignificant, had she said ? – but to Trevor’s eye it was an impressive place of pleasing proportions, with two balanced turrets and a serene moat encircling its base of gray stone. A suitable birthplace for a queen who had been heralded for her grace more than for her morals.

“Easy to see how this first view would dazzle an impressionable girl like
Anne Arborton,” Rayley said.  “She must have felt as if she was being carried away like a princess in a child’s fairy tale.”

“True enough,” Trevor sa
id.  “The disrepair everyone has claimed the castle suffers is hardly evident from this vantage point.  I suppose we shall see more signs of ruin as we approach.”

“Some women are like that,” Rayley said, prodding his horse back into motion.  “They look better from afar.”

Trevor gave his own steed a gentle kick to the flanks.  The horses had come courtesy of Brown’s own farm, since being a constable was no more than a part-time occupation in these small towns, and Trevor supposed he and Rayley had much to thank the man for.  Who knows, perhaps in the process of retrieving Anne Arborton from her love nest, they might also find the sort of criminal evidence that would help Brown approach the Crown with a formal complaint on behalf of the village. 

As they neared the castle, Rayley saw two swans c
ome into view, floating gently on the surface of the moat and he slowed his horse again to consider them. 

“Now that is quite l
ovely indeed,” Rayley said to Trevor, who had pulled up beside him.  “They say swans mate for life, you know.  An odd symbol for Hever, considering Anne Boleyn’s reputation for infidelity.”

“Surely you don’t believe that,” Trevor said, his tone as sharp as if Rayley had condemned a personal friend.  “The charges of adultery were trumped up so that Henry could be rid of her when she failed to give him a son.”

“I meant no particular offense against the lady,” Rayley said.  “After all, we are talking of a romance which soured more than three hundred years ago.  Who among us living today can say if Queen Anne was unfairly accused?”

“Well,” Trevor said
, “at least she was thoroughly English.”  His mind drifted back to the previous evening with Brown at the pub and how the man had insisted on calling the Boleyn family “the Bullens,” using their plain Kentish name rather than their affected French one. But the point was that Queen Anne’s family had been of farm stock, the salt of the earth, their roots as thoroughly British as those of the apple trees all around Trevor now.  And that was what mattered at the end of the day.

Rayley was
surprised at Trevor’s reaction, for his friend was usually a bit of a prig.  He would have assumed Trevor would be in greater sympathy with Catherine of Aragon, Henry’s devout but beleaguered first wife, who had been tossed aside for Boleyn.  But of course, Trevor could also be a bit of a nationalist, so perhaps in his mind it was better to have an English-born whore on the throne than a foreign-born saint.  The man could be morally confounding at times, very nearly self-contradictory. And it furthermore occurred to Rayley, as he and Trevor remained paused in silence gazing down upon the walls of Hever, that the painter LaRusse Chapman was much like the monarch Henry VIII – taking one woman after another for his use, callously abandoning each when she failed to met his needs. 

“Emma says it’
s haunted,” Trevor said abruptly.

“By Anne Boleyn?”

“Precisely.   Legend claims you can see her at night, on a bridge.  That oak one there, I should imagine, that crosses the moat.  The young King Henry came here to pay suit to her, you know.  It is where he proposed marriage, and they say that after her beheading, her spirit returned here, presumably to a place where she had once been happy.”

“Does her ghost still have its head?”

The question pulled Trevor up short and he laughed.  “There isn’t a ghost at all, Abrams, that’s just local superstition.  You’re joking, of course.”

“Of course,” said Rayley and just then the pair of swans
disappeared from his sight, in sweet unison, beneath the heavy oaken bridge.  And he could not have said why, but as he watched them a nervous shudder ran through his slender frame.