The Constant Companion (15 page)

Seven days had passed since the disappearance of Lady Philip Cautry. The servants had been told not to breath a word of it, but servants are only human, and after each one had confided in his or her closest friend, and the closest friend had confided in his or her closest friend, soon the whole of the top ten thousand knew that Constance had absconded with her husband’s jewels, and gleefully pointed out there had always been bad blood in the Lambertons.

Lady Amelia gave a party to celebrate. Mrs. Besant who claimed to have inside information dined out more grandly than she had for some time. Only Lady Eleanor, strangely enough, maintained stoutly that she did not believe a word of it. Philip had gone through the week in a numb daze. He did not want to believe it but what else could he do? Mr. Evans, whom he trusted absolutely, had assured him that Lady Philip had been strangely nervous and upset when he had last seen her—so much so that he had felt it his duty to insist she have some refreshment.

Masters, the butler, said that her ladyship had run past in the hall and had stumbled several times as she had climbed the stairs.

When he himself had returned home after a strange summons to his sister in Kensington, and had found his wife missing, he had bad-temperedly assumed she had gone to the opera again, and had gone to his room to change into his evening clothes, only to find his jewel box lying on the floor and most of the contents gone.

A hurried search of his wife’s room had revealed that several dresses and a trunk were missing, although the dress and bonnet she had worn that day were lying on the bed.

The most damning evidence was that of the lady’s maid, Bouchard. My lady, she had said, had muttered something about not being able to bear it any longer, and had locked herself in her rooms after telling Bouchard to take the rest of the day off.

Mrs. Besant had described Constance as “strange and wild-eyed.” Lord Philip began to think he had not known Constance at all. He had ridden to see her impossible relatives, the Barringtons, but they had not heard from her. He had traveled to Berry House, only to find it deserted and abandoned. It was then that he learned his friend Peter Potter was gone from Town, and no one knew where.

Lord Philip, who had by now wildly conjured up an image of Constance as a wily and cunning seductress, felt quite sure his friend had been dragged into the plot by her. He felt bitterly humiliated.

Peter and his wife.…

And having felt that he had discovered the reason for Constance’s flight, he plunged bitterly into all his old familiar sports and pastimes.

By the second week of Constance’s disappearance, London Society had found something else to talk about. Lord Philip did not even know that the urgent note summoning him to go to his sister’s in Kensington that night had been a forgery. He had arrived at the villa and had said abruptly, “I believe you wished to see me on some urgent matter?” And Lady Eleanor, who considered all of her business urgent, had found nothing amiss, and had proceeded to bore him with a long dissertation on how she hoped to get Mr. Rider elected to Parliament.

He loved Constance, and he hated her. At times he prayed he would never see her again so that he could get over his pain, and at others he longed to hold her in his arms so that he could choke the life out of her.

He barricaded his feelings behind a facade of impeccable dress and chilly manners. He had his long hair cut short in the new Brutus crop, and broke more hearts than he had ever done before.

But time did not ease his hurt. It only built up a picture in his mind of a leering, cunning, laughing Constance who had stolen his jewels and his heart and his best friend.

He was dressing one afternoon to go out. It was now four weeks since the disappearance of his wife and he was carefully “putting on his armor,” as his valet sadly described it to Masters. Cravat tied in the Mathematical, coat of Bath superfine, striped waistcoat, doeskin trousers moulded to his long legs, and glossy Hessians, so brilliant that if he stared at his toes he could see the distorted reflection of his white and bitter face.

His valet was flicking a brush across his shoulders when Masters appeared in the doorway of his dressing room.

“Mr. Potter has called, my lord,” said Masters, his face like wood. For the servants had learned from Mr. Potter’s servants that Mr. Potter had disappeared on the night of my lady’s disappearance, and had put one and one together, making two.

“
What!
” Lord Philip swung around so violently that he struck the brush from the valet’s hand.

“Mr. Potter, my lord,” repeated Masters.

Lord Philip took a deep breath.

He strode from the room and slowly descended the stairs.

Peter was sitting in the dark drawing room, happily sipping Madeira and turning the glass round and round in his fingers. He was busy composing a poem while he waited and was suddenly brought forcibly back to the present as the point of a sword pressed into his neck. He stared up, looking more foolish and sheepish than ever, along a yard of cold steel to the blazing green eyes of Lord Philip Cautry.

“
Where is my wife?
”

Peter blinked, and gingerly took the steel between finger and thumb and tried to push it away.

“I don’t know,” he said vaguely. “I’ve only just got back. Are you trying to kill me, Philip?”

“I will, an you don’t tell me the doxy’s whereabouts,” grated Lord Philip.

“Steady on,” said Peter, feeling the point of the rapier scraping his neck. “I don’t
know.
”

“Where have you been?”

“At Channelhurst,” said Peter. “My aunt died, you know, the one I told you about. Left me a packet. What on earth is up with you?”

Philip lowered the sword, feeling suddenly weary. As he stared down at his friend’s amiable face, he wondered how he could possibly believe Peter guilty of any treachery.

“I must be going mad,” he cried, sitting down in the chair opposite. In a low voice, he told Peter what had happened.

Peter took out his quizzing glass, and began to poke it inside one of his shoes. Then he took the straps of his pantaloons, and began to tug at them one after the other until one of them snapped, and his trouser leg, released from its mooring, began to slowly climb up his leg, revealing a canary yellow stocking embroidered with a bird of paradise.

“You
are
going mad,” he said at last. “It’s
Constance
, we’re talking about. Sweetest little girl I ever met. She couldn’t do a thing like that. Why should she? She had all the money in the world as Lady Philip.”

“I thought she had gone off with you,” exclaimed Philip. “God, what a fool…”

“Off with me?” Peter’s mouth fell open, and he finally closed it again by shoving the knob of his cane under his chin.

“Yes, you. I thought perhaps… well, I was very fond of her father, but there’s no denying the Lambertons are a wild lot, and…”

“You’ve got windmills in your head. When it comes to that old family name of yours, Philip, you become a different person. You’re much too high in the instep for your own good. You’re still
ashamed
of having married Constance because you might have had a duke’s daughter. Come, now. Admit it! Didn’t it ever cross your mind that something might have happened to her? Someone might have been getting money out of her for some reason? After all, someone did try to kill her on her wedding day.…”

Philip suddenly remembered the Comte Duval, and despite his promises of secrecy to the gentlemen of the Foreign Office, decided he must tell Peter.

“So you see,” ended Philip, “it was pretty fishy. She only caught bits of it but she remembered ‘trahison’ and ‘espion’—traitor and spy. The comte and his friend may have thought she understood what was said and was going to blab about it some time or t’other.”

“Well, now you think about it, he may have been behind her disappearance, so what do we do?” said Peter, sitting up.

Lord Philip gave a nasty smile. “Why,” he said gently, “we will do what I should have done a long time ago. We shall go round and pay a call on the Comte Duval—and if he has any information at all, we shall choke it out of him.”

The comte lived in a narrow house in Half Moon Street. Lord Philip and Peter noticed with sinking hearts that the knocker was off the door and the blinds were drawn. The day was slightly chilly, and a small red sun peered through a haze of smoky cloud high above the city. A Punch and Judy man was entertaining a group of servants at the end of the street, and the shrill voice of Judy berating Punch cackled over the cobblestones. At the other end of the street, out of sight, a barrel organ was murdering the music of the young Rossini.

The pair gloomily surveyed the house, and Philip was about to turn away when his eye caught the twitch of a blind on one of the upper floors.

He whispered something to Peter who nodded, and then they walked off down the street.

Through a chink in the blind, the Comte Duval watched them go. He had known the game was up when he had been seated next to Sir Augustus Curtis at dinner last night. Sir Augustus Curtis was a prominent member of the Foreign Office. He had barely been able to bring himself to speak to the comte, and at one point during the dinner, when the comte had teasingly laid a hand on Sir Augustus’s arm, that gentleman had jerked his arm away, and had carefully dusted his sleeve with his lace handkerchief as if the very touch of the comte was contaminating. So they suspected him. They certainly had no proof. But it was time to leave. He had dismissed all his servants, sold his carriages and horses at Tattersall’s, and put his property up for sale at Garroway’s coffee house in the City. A small portmanteau, his only luggage, lay strapped on the floor. He would wait a few minutes to make sure that accursed pair had well and truly left, and then take a hack to Ludgate Hill and then from there travel by stagecoach to the coast.

He crept quietly downstairs through the deserted empty house and stood behind the front door. Punch’s squeaky voice at one end of the street mingled with the strains of
The Italian Girl in Algiers
from the other.

Rapid footsteps approached the house and he waited, holding his breath, only to let it out in a gasp of relief as the footsteps went on past the house.

He cautiously opened the front door a crack, and then stared down at the reflection of his face in a glossy Hessian boot which had been thrust into the crack in the door.

In the next minute Lord Philip Cautry had forced his way in, followed by Peter Potter.

The comte backed off up the shadowy hall, a smile pasted on his thin rouged lips. “Ah, it is only you, Cautry,” he said, pleased to note that his voice was steady. “I thought footpads had found their way in.”

“Where’s Constance?” said Philip in a cool pleasant voice, which was somehow more frightening than if he had screamed.

“Your wife? Why should I know the whereabouts of your wife?” smiled the comte. “Come, man, relax and have some wine with me. Your family tragedy has turned your head.”

Philip looked at him. “Constance overheard you talking to someone at my sister’s. No, she didn’t know French, but she memorized some of the words and caught the words ‘traitor’ and ‘spy.’

“Of course she did,” laughed the comte, very much at his ease. “I was discussing the sad business of traitorous spies working in this country for Napoleon Bonaparte.”

Philip felt his heart sink. Then to his surprise, he heard Peter saying in a light voice, “Oh, really, my dear comte. Fanny Braintree told us
all
. We know everything down to the last document she stole from her father’s desk.

“Lies,” said the comte weakly, but Philip noticed his face had gone chalky white under his paint.

Surprising both men, the comte darted for the stairs and began to run up them as fast as he could. Philip and Peter bounded in pursuit.

The comte fled upwards, but knowing there was no escape. An image of the gallows at Tyburn flashed before his eyes. He darted into a bedroom on the second floor and slammed the door, leaning against it, panting, and hearing the heavy thud of footsteps running up to the door outside. He turned the key in the lock and ran to the window and hauled it up. The sun had disappeared and long yellow fingers of fog were beginning to creep along the streets. The door behind him shook as Philip threw his weight against it. Like most people, the comte credited everyone with his own sins. He had tortured and beaten many a victim in his checkered past, and he felt sure there would be little of him left to hang on the gallows by the time Lord Philip was finished with him.

With a final ear-splitting crack the door gave behind him. With a great cry he flung himself from the window and his body hurtled down to the cobbles and lay still, looking like the lifeless puppets on the counter of the now finished Punch and Judy show.

Philip and Peter ran out into the street and slowly turned the comte over. Blood was pouring from a wound in his head and his breath was coming in rapid, fluttering sighs.

Philip knelt down beside him.

“Where is Constance?” he said. “What have you done with her?”

The comte’s black eyes slowly opened, their dying light enlivened by a faint flicker of malice.

“In… the… river. Dead,” he said. He choked and a stream of blood gushed from his mouth over the cobbles, and the little gleam of malice in his eyes flared up triumphantly and then died.

“He’s dead,” said Peter, pulling Philip away.

“And so is she,” muttered Philip. “How shall I live without her now, Peter? How shall I live with myself?”

The news of the comte’s perfidy was all over London next day. Peter saw to that. Constance was exonerated. Lady Amelia tried to spread gossip that Constance had been the Comte Duval’s mistress and found herself socially ostracized as a result—her dear friend, Mary Besant, making sure everyone knew from whence the rumor had hailed. Dismal, chilly fog lay over the streets of London as if it had come to stay forever. Summer had gone and there had been very little autumn, only a hurried descent into the depths of winter.

Lord Philip’s tall figure dressed from head to foot in mourning black became a familiar figure in the streets of London as he walked and walked and walked, only returning to his home late at night to fall into an exhausted and nightmare-ridden sleep.