Cut to the Quick (3 page)

“If you’re going to be ill,” said Kestrel, not ungently, “you’d best have it over before you get into the hack. Drivers can be devilish unpleasant about those things.”

“I think I’ll be all right. I’m not used to having this much to drink.”

“That possibility had occurred to me.”

“I’m supposed to be celebrating. I’m getting married in less than two months.”

Kestrel looked at him more closely. Hugh stared down at the pavement, prodding it with his toe.

The hackney drove up. Kestrel tossed a coin to the link-boy, who caught it deftly with one hand. Hugh got into the carriage, then let down the side-glass and poked out his head. “Mr. Kestrel, I—”

Julian saw a display of gratitude coming, and ducked it hastily.

“Good night, Mr. Fontclair,” he said, and stepped back to let the hackney drive away.

“A bit blue-deviled, that ’un looked/* said the link-boy, jerking his head after Hugh’s carriage.

“More than a bit, I should say,” Julian agreed. Who is he going to marry, he wondered, and why did he make that lugubrious face at the prospect? He’s young to be getting married. For God’s sake, he’s young to be let out without a nurse.

He gave his head a shake, to clear away Hugh Fontclair and his concerns. You ought to have been a parson, he mocked at himself, so you could go about wrapping people’s throats in flannel and poking your nose into their affairs. He shrugged, and went back inside the gambling house.

*

Julian Kestrel lived in a first-floor flat in Clarges Street. The ceilings were high, and the windows large. The walls were painted ivory. The mahogany furniture was handsome but not too plentiful; Julian hated clutter. Here and there were keepsakes he had picked up on his travels: a Venetian glass decanter, a Moorish prayer rug, a marble head of a Roman goddess, an oil painting of the Tuscan hills. Crossed rapiers hung over the mantelpiece; they looked ornamental, but close inspection revealed they had seen a good deal of use. A small bust of Mozart occupied a place of honour by the pianoforte. Under the piano was a canterbury full of well-worn sheets of music.

It was about one o’clock in the afternoon, and Julian was finishing breakfast. He generally stopped for breakfast about halfway through the elaborate process of dressing. At this stage, he was wearing a white shirt with a high embroidered collar, thin-striped grey Cossack trousers, and a dressing gown of bottle-green silk brocade. A coffeepot and a cup and saucer were all that remained of his meal. Every so often his manservant, who was brushing his coat and waistcoat, came over and refilled the cup, first feeling the coffeepot to be sure it was still hot.

Julian was sorting through the morning’s post. As usual, it consisted mostly of invitations and bills. He glanced swiftly over the invitations, culling out those he would accept. But one letter gave him pause. He sat back in his chair and read it again, more slowly.

“Dipper,” he said, “what would you do if a fellow you’d only met once, and hardly knew from Adam, suddenly wrote and asked you to be best man at his wedding?”

The servant looked up from his work. He was small and lithe, about twenty years old, with a round face and quick-moving, supple fingers. His hair and eyes were the colour of a mud puddle—an almost iridescent brown. “Sounds like a rum go, sir.”

“Rather. But everything about this wedding is a little rum. Of course, it’s no great novelty for a man of Hugh Fontclair’s birth to barter his name for a fortune. But the Fontclairs are an old Norman family, and proud as Lucifer. The on-dit is that Sir Robert must be all to pieces, or he’d never allow his heir to marry a tradesman’s daughter. And yet there’s never been so much as a whisper up to now that the Fontclairs were hard up.”

“Maybe it ain’t the money Mr. Fontclair fancies, sir.” “Sentimentalist! It certainly isn’t the girl. When Fontclair told me he was going to be married, he had much more the air of being in harness than in love.” He added thoughtfully, “I don’t know much about Miss Craddock. Her father keeps her under close guard; it’s said he’s afraid of fortune-hunters. There’d be a certain justice in it if she mended some poor devil’s fortunes—God knows, her father’s been the ruin of enough men. He began as a moneylender, you know, and even among that vampirical lot, he had a reputation for ruthlessness.”

“So Mr. Fontclair’s asked you to be groomsman at his wedding, sir?”

“Yes, and in the meantime to spend a fortnight at his father’s country place in Cambridgeshire. Some sort of family party—the bride and groom, the bride’s father, and some of the groom’s relations.” He frowned. “Why on earth should he want to get on such an intimate footing with me all of a sudden? We’ve only met once that I know of, at a gaming hell a few weeks ago. He was threatening to make an ass of himself, and I sent him home to bed.”

Dipper shot a shrewd glance at him. There had to De more to the story than that. You did not ask a cove to be groomsman at your wedding in return for his chucking you out of a gambling house. But if Mr. Kestrel had done something handsome, there would be no getting him to talk about it.

He fell to polishing the buttons on Julian's coat. “A lot of the swell mob goes to weddings," he reminisced. “If there's a big crowd, and you got the right kind of duds, you can mingle with the guests, and nobody'll ever know you wasn’t invited. They're bad places to try and lift any wipes, on account of with all the blubbering that goes on, everybody's always using theirs. Tickers is easy to get, though—nobody's thinking about what time it is. I never had the heart to work a wedding, meself. When people is as happy as that, how can you queer it for 'em by filing their clys? I ask you, sir."

“With sensibilities like yours, I often wonder how you ever managed to steal anything at all.”

“I picked and chose me marks, sir, when I could afford to. Gentry coves like you, sir, as looked as if they wouldn't miss a few quid here and there.”

“You can't judge a man's finances by his clothes. Some of the heaviest swells in London have some of the lightest pocketbooks.” “Oh, yes, I know that now, sir.”

“Since you came to work for me, you mean,” said Julian, amused. He looked ruefully at the pile of bills on the table. “You know, it wouldn't be amiss for us to spend a fortnight out of London, far from gaming tables and importunate tailors. Our finances are becoming a little . . . involved.” He glanced at Hugh's letter again, and sighed. “The devil of it is, I shall have to go. It's the only way I shall ever find out why I was invited.”

Philippa found it hard to be eleven years old. She knew she should be docile, like her sister Joanna, and do as older people told her without asking for explanations. But that was so difficult, when she felt fully as wise as any adult she knew, except her mother. Her father was a very important man, of course—Sir Robert Fontclair, a baronet, landlord, and magistrate. Yet Philippa, summing up his character judiciously, could not help thinking he did not understand people very well. He had, perhaps, a bit too much honour and not enough common sense.

It might be that he was weighed down by his own authority. Philippa had a poor opinion of authority and did not submit to it very well. When she was forbidden to do something she had set her heart on, she thought the prohibition over carefully, and if she decided it was unfair or unnecessary, she disobeyed it. Which was why, when her governess told her she could not meet Mr. Kestrel until tomorrow, she decided to slip away from the schoolroom and have a peek at him that evening. “We could wait outside his room while he dresses for dinner,’* she told Joanna. “Everyone else is going to meet him tonight. Why shouldn’t we?**

But of course Joanna would have no part of the plan. It would be improper; Mr. Kestrel would think they were nothing but a pair of hoydens. Joanna was thirteen and becoming awfully self-conscious about anything to do with gentlemen—Philippa could not imagine why. But if Joanna would not go with her, she would go alone.

Mr. Kestrel had arrived at Bellegarde just in time for the first dinner bell, which summoned the grown-ups to dress. Joanna and Philippa had dined already, in the schoolroom with Miss Pritchard, their governess. Philippa waited till Joanna and Pritchie were busy working on an embroidery stitch, then stole out of the schoolroom. On gaining the hallway, she raced to Mr. Kestrel’s room and stood sentry outside his door.

At last it opened, and a gentleman came out. He was all in black. Philippa feasted her eyes on him—her first real London dandy.

He saw her, and his brows went up. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. I’m Julian Kestrel.”

“Yes, I know!” she breathed.

“May I ask why you’re looking at me as though I were a firework display?”

“You’re much better than fireworks. They’re all over in a moment, and you’re going to stay for a whole fortnight. Besides, fireworks are noisy, and they make too much smoke.”

“I’m very quiet,” he assured her, “and of course I never smoke in the presence of a lady.”

“I’m Philippa Fontclair.” She looked at him approvingly, liking him much better than the dull, handsome men Joanna admired. He had a dark, irregular face and hair of a rich brown, like mahogany. His eyes were brown, too, but with a green gleam about them, especially when he smiled, or was looking at you very intently. He was slender and spare and not above medium height, but he had presence—the way royalty probably did in the old days, before it was fat and fussy and came from Germany. He looked splendid in his clothes, and yet there was nothing showy or striking about them, except that his linen was so spotless, and everything fit him so well. Being a dandy was not so much what you wore, Philippa decided, but how you wore it.

She thought for a moment, then said brightly, “This is such a big house, I was afraid you might not be able to find the drawing room, so I came to show you the way.”

“That was very thoughtful of you.”

He doesn’t believe me, she thought. He’s smart. “Have you been shown around the house yet?”

“No. I’ve only just arrived.”

“Well, the house is very simple, really, if you keep straight in your mind that it’s divided into three parts. We’re in the middle part now. It’s the part I like best. It was built in the time of Queen Elizabeth, and some of the rooms have been kept just as they were in those days. Your room is one of those. The rooms down the hall from yours have been done over in a modern style, and they’re quite dull. You might as well live inside a piece of Wedgwood. They’re guest rooms, but nobody’s using them now. You have this whole corridor to yourself. The panelling is nice, isn’t it? It’s linenfold.” Julian nodded. “Very handsome.” He glanced around, getting his bearings. His room was at the end of a blind corridor. There was a table there, with a basket of flowers on it. Farther down the corridor, on the same side as his room, were two more doors, which must be the redecorated guest rooms Philippa despised.

There was only one door opposite his room. “That's the great chamber,” Philippa said. “We can go through it to reach the stairs.” She opened the door, and they went in. “This is one of the rooms that’s been kept as it was in Elizabethan times. We don’t use it ver> much. It’s just to look at.”

“It’s well worth the looking,” said Julian. For the room was resplendent with carved and gilded wood, heraldic designs, and colourful tapestries, The plaster ceiling was a riot of birds and flowers, scrolls and acanthus leaves. Julian, whose tastes usually ran to space, light, and simplicity, was surprised to find himself captivated. It was all so artlessly exuberant. He thought how beautifully it expressed the spirit of an age when continents were being discovered, when Armadas were defeated, and great English poets and dramatists flourished. An age, he thought, when it must have seemed that anything was possible to humankind.

“I’ve always thought this room ought to have a ghost,” Philippa was saying. “It’s so old, and nobody uses it anymore—it's just the sort of place to be haunted. Olivier Fontclair would make a good ghost. He's an ancestor of ours who lived in Elizabethan times and was mixed up in the Babington Plot and had to flee the country.

Mama says there aren’t any ghosts, really. But, just supposing there were—supposing bad people’s souls didn’t rest quietly in their graves—wouldn’t you think a man who plotted treason against his queen might be condemned to haunt his family house? Especially if he wasn’t caught and punished while he was alive.”

"If everyone who died with unpunished sins on his conscience came back as a ghost, the living would be crowded out of every home in England.”

“You’re cynical. I thought you would be. Can you sneer?” “With terrifying effect.”

“Oh, do it, please! I want to see it!”

“I’m afraid you’re much too young to withstand it. I should be accused of stunting your growth—perhaps even sending you into a decline.”

“I wouldn’t go into a decline. I’m robust. My governess says so. But, come along, I mustn’t make you late to dinner.”

They went down a monumental staircase, with arcaded banisters and terminal posts topped with gryphons. “Anyway,” she went on, “as I was telling you, the house is divided into three parts: the main house, the new wing, and the servants* wing. We’re in the main house now. The dining room and the library are on the ground floor. Upstairs there are only guest rooms and the great chamber. Mr. and Miss Craddock’s rooms are around the corner from yours. Have you met them?”

“No, not yet.”

“I don’t like Mr. Craddock. He’s gruff and bearish. Miss Craddock is very nice. She often comes to see Joanna and me in the schoolroom. We like her.”

That emphatic we spoke volumes: We like her, even if other people don’t.    *

They passed through the vast great hall, with its hammerbeam ceiling and stained-glass windows. “Those doors under the minstrels’ gallery open on the screens passage,” Philippa said. ‘You have to cross it to get to the servants’ wing. The three parts of the house are all in a row: servants’ wing, main house, new wing. We’re going to the new wing now.”

Julian pictured the facade of the house, which he had seen to advantage when he arrived. Philippa must be taking him to the right-hand wing which was set farther back from the rest. It was built of the same grey stone, but in a graceful classical design that contrasted starkly with the crenellated walls and mullioned windows of the older part of the house.