Death and the Courtesan (9 page)

“It all sounds perfectly wonderful, Mrs. Moly,” said Arabella, casting an approving eye down the list. “But I wonder whether you could add a few curry dishes?”

“Curries?”

“Yes. Can you make them?”

“I
can
. But you have nevair ask for thees before.”

“And I probably never shall again. But Uncle Selwyn will be joining us, as you know, and I think he rather got to like the stuff in Ceylon.”

“Oh!” exclaimed the cook, reaching for a cream bun. “So
that
ees why I nevaire ’eard of thees Selweens before. He leev far away.”

“Yes. But his wife has died, and now he is returning to England. Uncle Selwyn wrote us often before you came to Lustings, and long ago he used to come for visits when home on leave. But my aunt never did; never wrote, never saw us. It was sad, you know, because she was probably the closest thing we had to a mother, growing up.”

The cook clucked in disapproval and patted Arabella’s hand. “Because you and Mees Belinda make sex for money, and she was ashamed of that.”

“I suppose so. But she never seemed that sort of person. She wasn’t judgmental in the least. Well. I shall never know, now.”

Here the reader may be forgiven for feeling slightly at sea. It was
not
usual practice for mistress and servant to console each other over coffee and cream buns, but Lustings was run along somewhat original lines. And in order to understand the unique bond that Arabella shared with her servants, it is necessary that you know something of their histories.

Charlotte Janks, the housekeeper, was comfortable, fortyish, plump, and gray haired. She was just one of many candidates who had answered Arabella’s advertisement, all of whom were attracted by the generous salary and not put off by the Misses Beaumont’s profession. But Mrs. Janks had arrived with a black eye—a good-luck gift from her husband—and with shoe soles worn right through from having walked the thirty miles to London.

“Have you any housekeeping experience, Mrs. Janks?” Arabella had asked, on being informed that the woman had brought no references.

“Bless you, miss! I’ve been keeping house these last thirty years—raising my children to grow up clean, kind, and honest, and giving them a warm and loving home.”

“Well, that is commendable, but you haven’t had experience working for a master, have you?”

“I should say I have! Harry Janks is the worst master in England, if not in Europe! I’ve been ill-used, cheated on, lied to, and shamed to my very bones. Yet I always kept the children safe from him, miss, that I did, and every one of them’s gone out and done good in the world.”

After the interview, Arabella told her, “I shall engage you, Mrs. Janks, on the sole condition that you leave your husband for good and promise neither to send him money nor to see him when he calls for you.”

“Oh, but, madam! You don’t know him! He’s a monster when he’s been drinking!”

“On the contrary, I know all I need to know of him. You needn’t fear, Mrs. Janks; if your husband dares show his face here, my coachmen and gardeners will give him such a drubbing that it will permanently affect his memory.”

“Ma’am?”

“I mean that he will forget entirely where you are living, and probably find himself some other poor woman to torture.”

Arabella had first encountered her parlor maid, Marianne Fielding, whilst the latter was on trial for stealing a silver teaspoon, and facing deportation to Australia. Our heroine had been sitting in on the trial as a lark, watching her lawyer lover do what he did best. She had been touched by the girl’s plight and volunteered to take charge of her after learning that Marianne had been desperate to raise money for her sister’s abortion. People said she was mad to hire a maid who had already proven her untrustworthiness, but Arabella silenced the critics by asking, “What better punishment, then, than to be obliged to polish my silver teaspoons once a week for the rest of her life?”

“You are too good,” the Reverend Kendrick had murmured. “If circumstances were different, you would be hailed as one of the greatest Christian philanthropists of the age.”

Arabella had laughed. “Even though I never go to church?”

“Well, that’s why I specified different circumstances.”

“Oh! I thought you meant, if I weren’t a wh—”

“Miss Beaumont, your carriage has arrived. Allow me to hand you in.”

She had never had cause to regret her impulsive act. For Fielding, tall, serious, and all of nineteen years old, had proven herself to be a devoted and hardworking employee, and Arabella would have trusted her with the Star of India.

Little Sheila Doyle, Lustings’s red-haired chambermaid, had been rescued by her mistress from Dublin’s infamous Magdalene Laundry. Arabella had offered a certain sum to the mother superior, who, after praying about it, had happily informed Arabella that God had instructed her to take the money and release the girl. As mistress and servant were preparing to embark for London, however, word reached them that this same mother superior, Sheila’s chief torturer whilst she was there, had died. Whereupon the girl had fallen to her knees and wept!

“Oh, madam! ’Tis my fault! Didn’t I pray for the auld biddy to drop dead, and here she has! ’Tis a terrible sin I’m having on me soul now, for I’ve killed a bride of Christ!”

“Nonsense,” Arabella had said, in her practical way. “
You
didn’t kill that nun, Doyle; God killed her
for
you. Now get up, please, or we’ll miss the boat.”

Louisa Molyneux, or “Mrs. Molyneux,” or “Cook,” or “Mrs. Moly,” was a refugee from the French Revolution. Arabella had played no part in her rescue; had, in fact, literally stolen her from the employ of Lady Ribbonhat. For on one occasion, when that august personage was vacationing in Biarritz, the duke had taken Arabella to the ancestral pile, and she had been so enchanted by the meals served to her there that she’d slipped into the kitchen and engaged this dark-haired, merry-eyed sylph on the spot.

Last, and, some might say least, was fourteen-year-old Tilda Crouch, who now helped Mrs. Moly in the kitchen. Crouch was illiterate and simple but good-hearted and anxious to please. The Misses Beaumont had found her one day, unconscious and starving on the streets, and had simply taken her home in their carriage.

In the beginning, Arabella’s admirers, who were mostly men, with mostly ulterior motives, had occasionally tried to praise her for her Christian charity. But Arabella soon put a stop to that.

“Sow your field with wretches whom you’ve plucked from the depths,” said she, “and reap a lifetime of faithful service for extremely low wages.”

Of course, the wages she paid weren’t really low. Quite the opposite, in fact, but her admirers weren’t to know that. And when Arabella’s servants had looked upon the rooms and beds that were to be theirs while they remained in her service, they were overcome with a gratitude so profound they could not speak.

She kept only women servants inside her house, but Arabella also employed male grooms and a coachman, who doubled as liveried butler and footmen; two gardeners; and a gardener’s boy. These were all fine, lusty fellows—so Arabella made sure that they ate and slept in their own quarters, over the stables.

 

“Is that a horse I hear in the drive?” she asked, looking up from the menu. “Mrs. Moly, can you see who it is from over there?”

The cook stretched her torso out from under one of the loggia arches.

“Eet ees ze Reevrond Kendrick, madam,” said she, nearly toppling down into the garden as she tried to retract herself.

“Excellent! Does he look pleased or perturbed?”

“I am sorry, madam; all I could see was hees-a horse’s ass.”

“Who’s a horse’s ass?” asked Belinda, emerging from the library.

“The Reverend Kendrick,” said Arabella, absently scanning the menu once again.

“We could also ’ave ortolan,” suggested the cook.

“What are those?” Belinda asked.

“Tiny songbirds, fattened on figs,” Arabella replied. “No, I’m sorry, Mrs. Moly; there won’t be time. We would have to special order them from France—there aren’t any suppliers in Britain.”

“Oh, but zere
are,
madame! An’ we could easily catch zem ourselves! Zee birds in your aviatory are half-tame already! And zhust theenk of the wonderful feathers you would ’ave left over for trimming your ’ats!”

Arabella regarded her with horror. “Are you suggesting we should eat my Figpeckers?!”

“But av course! Not zhust ze Pigfuggers—
all
of your small bairds ’ave grown fat on a diet of fruit and delicacies. Zey would make delicious ortolan!”

“Mrs. Molyneux, you are not to consider such a thing! All sentiment aside, the aviatory’s least expensive inhabitant cost me upward of ten pounds!”

“But ’ow can zat be?” cried the cook. “Whenever I go to feed zem, zey cry, ‘Cheap! Cheap!’ and I feel zat I am not making zee best use of your kitchen budget.”

At this point, Arabella realized that the cook was cracking one of those monstrous Gallic jokes of hers. All the same . . .

“Mrs. Moly,” she said, “I hereby absolve you from your bird-feeding duties. In future I shall assign that task to Tilda, exclusively.” She suddenly noticed Belinda’s presence. “Don’t come out here, Bunny! You mustn’t see what we’re going to have until it’s actually on the table!”

“But—”

“Go!
Go!
”

“All right, but do you
really
think that Reverend Kendrick is a horse’s ass?”

“Belinda! How can you say such a thing? When he has always been so kind and considerate toward you!”

“But
I
didn’t say that!
You
did!”

“Now you are not making sense! You aren’t having a stroke, are you?”

Belinda began to cry.

Arabella was flabbergasted. “What in the world—What do you make of this, Mrs. Moly?”

“Eef she was having a stroke, I don’ theenk she
could
cry.”

Arabella rose and embraced her sister, patting her shoulder.

“All right. All right. There, there now, darling. I expect you’re just suffering from pre-party excitement. Now you go inside where it’s cool and have a little lie down. Ask Fielding to bring you a wet cloth for your brow.”

“Good heavens! Whatever can be ailing Miss Belinda?” asked Kendrick in alarm, coming out onto the loggia. At sight of him, Belinda burst into a fresh spasm of weeping and hurried off to find solace elsewhere. Mrs. Molyneux went after her.

“It’s the excitement,” Arabella explained. “We are all on edge just now. Were you able to track down the sailor?”

“Yes and no. His name is Jack Furrow, but I am afraid you won’t be able to talk to him; he sailed for Borneo shortly before the murder. In fact, that’s probably why he was chosen to steal your knife, because his departure for foreign lands was imminent, and his likelihood of survival small.”

“Mmm, yes,” said Arabella reflectively. “He’ll likely end up a titbit for cannibals. Well, at least we know that the murderer was a man, according to the sailor’s testimony, someone who planned to implicate me
before
he killed Euphemia. That may or may not be significant.”

She made a note in the blue notebook, which she had lately begun to keep with her when she went out and even when she stayed in, taking it along from room to room. Observing this, her thoughtful sister had netted her a bag for it. After a bit, Belinda reappeared, looking somewhat more composed.

“. . . So the murderer
definitely
wasn’t Belinda,” said Arabella, without looking up. A close observer might have seen a wicked little smile appear at one corner of her mouth.

“What?!”
shrieked the poor child, hovering once again on the brink of hysteria.

“Oh, hush, darling; it was just in fun. I don’t seem to be making much headway with this investigation, Mr. Kendrick.”

“We mustn’t give up hope, whatever happens.”

“Why ever not?”

“Well . . . they taught us that in theological school,” he explained uncomfortably. “But now I come to think of it, they never told us
why
we shouldn’t. It is stupid, isn’t it? Of course it must be all right to give up hope, once there can no longer be any point in clinging to it!”

Reverend Kendrick had never had any real affinity for the church. His family had thoughtfully arranged this career for him so that, as a third son, he mightn’t starve to death. His one act of defiance had been in choosing the living at Effing, just so that he could make references, when he came into London, to “that Effing church! Those Effing choirboys!” He had also stubbornly refused to rise in the ranks. His grandmother had wanted him to become an archbishop, but she had died unfulfilled. In that respect, anyway.

“I mean, I’m not saying you should give up
now,
you know,” he went on, wishing he could stop talking. “You haven’t hit that brick wall yet. I’m sure there are still people you could talk to . . . or have me talk to. I should love to do something . . . anything I can! What are you . . . that is, how . . . do you know . . . ?”

“I have made an appointment to see an attorney,” said Arabella, “and then we shall see what we shall see. Will you stay to dinner, Mr. Kendrick?”

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure,” he said. “But, as I am dining here tomorrow night, perhaps it would be better if I didn’t.”

He took courteous leave of both ladies and left them.

“It’s just as well,” muttered Belinda, on the point of blowing her nose. “He is rather a horse’s ass, after all.”

They were still laughing as Kendrick rode down the drive, and his heart warmed within his breast to think of the girlish merriment with which Arabella faced her uncertain future: Here was true courage, and unassailable nobility!