Miss Tonks Turns to Crime Page 5

  By the time they sat down at the dinner table in Lord Eston’s private parlour, both were very hungry, having only eaten some thin toast that morning. Cassandra in her white muslin gown with a scarlet-and-gold Paisley shawl draped over her shoulders looked at her best, thought Miss Tonks, although Lord Eston, who had changed into evening dress, seemed now quite intimidating, made remote by elegant tailoring.

  “I called on you the day after the ball,” said Lord Eston to Cassandra. “I was told you were resting in your room.”

  “I wasn’t,” replied Cassandra. “I left during the night with Aunt Letitia.”

  “Why?”

  “Because … because of my rudeness to you, I was to be sent to a seminary in Bath. Aunt Letitia had been ordered from the house. I thought the best solution would be to accompany Aunt to London.”

  “To the hotel? What work will you do there?”

  “Whatever they care to give me.”

  Miss Tonks sat facing a mirror. She was somewhat comforted by her own reflection. She was wearing a small hat of swathed fabric and curled feathers. Her own brown merino gown was covered with a short plum-coloured spencer with long, close-fitting sleeves. A lady needed such fashionable armour at such a difficult dinner party.

  “I am sure there is no need for Cassandra to work,” she said quickly. “My sister will soon come to her senses.”

  “I do not intend to be a parasite,” pointed out Cassandra.

  Dinner was well cooked. Fish in oyster sauce was followed by boiled beef and vegetables, neck of pork roasted with apple sauce, hashed turkey, mutton steaks, salad, roasted wild duck, fried rabbits, and then a plum pudding and tartlets. To Miss Tonks’s dismay, Cassandra ate with a hearty appetite. She herself had perfected the art of appearing to take little while managing to consume quite a lot and thought Honoria must be even more lacking in the social graces than she had previously imagined, for Cassandra had been badly instructed.

  Lord Eston amused them during dinner with gossip and tittle-tattle about this and that. Miss Tonks did her best to supply some amusing anecdotes of her own, or rather of Lady Fortescue’s own, while darting anxious little glances at her niece, who was not making any effort to please.

  But towards the end of the meal, Miss Tonks realized she would need to excuse herself and make use of the chamberpot under the bed in the room she shared with Cassandra. She arose and murmured something and left the couple alone.

  “I admire your spirit of rebellion, Miss Cassandra,” said Lord Eston. “But what will happen to you in the future? As I recall from gossip, these owners of the Poor Relation are even more antique than your aunt. What will you do when they shuffle off this mortal coil?”

  “Perhaps by that time,” said Cassandra, “I shall be considered old enough to make a suitable governess.”

  “Now that is a sorry life. Few governesses manage to find a comfortable establishment. They are treated with contempt by the servants and masters alike. Often the unwanted attentions of the master or the grown sons of the house are thrust upon her.”

  Cassandra smiled. “As to that, I am quite plain, my lord, and therefore not likely to receive any over-warm attentions.”

  “You are not plain to my eyes, freckle face. But even were you an absolute Friday-faced antidote, then that would not protect you. Men in their cups will attack anything vulnerable. I would see you better protected.”

  “There must be a way for a female to survive in this world without the aid of men,” said Cassandra. “Perhaps the Blue Stockings of London will adopt me.”

  “Then I hope your education has been of a high order. Despite popular opinion, any Blue Stocking with enough charity to take you under her wing would expect you to have a singularly well educated and informed mind.”

  Cassandra coloured. “I fear my education is only that considered sufficient for a female. I sew and paint and sing badly. I really should go and see what is keeping Miss Tonks.”

  “No, stay. She will be with us soon enough. Some more wine?”

  “If you please. I do not normally drink anything much stronger than lemonade and I hope I do not become foxed.”

  “I will let you know if there is any danger of that happening. So let us return to your prospects. You have obviously put all thoughts of marriage behind you.”

  “Why?”

  “Unless your parents are forgiving enough to supply you with a large dowry, then it will take a very strong gentleman indeed who would want to marry a glorified servant.”

  “You are rude.”

  “As you are. That snub at the ball was quite a facer. I cried all night. But let us be practical. You are not made to be a spinster.”

  “Spoken like a very man! May I remind you, my lord, that spinsters usually do not choose their lot in life. It is chosen for them. Lack of looks or, more often, lack of money.”

  “But you have chosen such a fate by your actions.”

  “What would you? Should I have meekly stood by and let them send me to that house of correction called a seminary in Bath? Should I have let Aunt Letitia walk unaccompanied in the middle of the night to the nearest inn?”

  “I admire your spirit. But I am sure your parents will travel to London as soon as possible to reclaim you, and by that time, you might be glad to go with them.”

  “I am tired of talking about me,” said Cassandra, wondering what on earth was keeping Miss Tonks. “I am sorry I was so rude to you at the ball, but the way I was being thrust upon you was the outside of enough. What of you? Do you plan to find a bride?”

  “I think I might.” He looked thoughtfully at her and his gaze fell to her soft and generous mouth. Cassandra hurriedly drank more wine to cover her sudden confusion. The air was suddenly full of sexual tension, although she did not know that, only being aware of a suffocated nervous feeling and a virginal awareness of danger. But when she looked up again into his lazy blue eyes, they showed nothing but interested amusement. “Will you find someone for me, Miss Cassandra, to save me the trouble of courting? I am not the poem-writing, languishing type.”

  “Then you have never been in love,” said Cassandra, suddenly thinking of the highwayman. “Anyone in love finds it quite easy to be ridiculous.”

  “Love? What do you know of love?”

  “Enough,” said Cassandra, tilting up her small stubborn chin.

  He sighed. “A lot of nonsense is talked about love and romance. Falling in love is an ephemeral thing, and the emotions engendered thereby do not last. If one is lucky, it is followed by all the difficulties of real love, or so I have observed.”

  “How cynical,” said Cassandra, but thinking all the while that if she really fell in love with, say, her highwayman, such a love would last a lifetime.

  “I have a good friend, Toby Humphrey. He fell in love with a certain Miss Darwin. Miss Darwin was admittedly an enchanting, dainty creature, like a fairy. She had little fortune and a tiresome family. But Toby was determined to marry her, and he did. A year of enchantment set in for Toby. He walked on air. But at the end of that year, the tide of passion receded and facing him across the breakfast table was an empty-headed little creature. Her baby talk, her lisp, which so recently drove him to ecstasies, grated day by day on his nerves. He became worried about the money she was spending on new gowns, money which he had gladly paid out to adorn his beloved at the height of his infatuation.”

  “And so what did he do?”

  “He rejoined the army, and from the safe distance of the Iberian Peninsula he writes her passionate love letters, not meaning a word of them, but grateful to her for not having stood in the way of his freedom.”

  “Poor lady.”

  “Oh, no, she is extremely happy. She has a pretty little villa at Norwood, she has these beautiful letters from her brave and devoted husband to read to her admiring friends; and said husband, who had become a tiresome bear, is around no longer to plague her.”

  “This is a ridiculous conversation. Very few people in society
marry for love and you know it.”

  “And very sensible too. Less people around to suffer the miseries of disappointment.”

  Cassandra rested her chin on her hands and surveyed him. “So you will choose a lady with a good pedigree and a good dowry, and after she has produced an heir for you, you will forget about her.”

  For some reason, Lord Eston felt his good humour fading fast. In fact, this was exactly what he had had in mind before he had come across this gauche hoyden with her freckled face and blunt manners.

  Sensing his anger, Cassandra said, “I look forward to my new role in life. I shall not be expected to dress like a fashion plate. You men are lucky. You do not suffer the tyrannies of fashion.”

  He raised his hands in mock horror. “I am a slave to my tailor. What vile language his breed have for colours. ‘What think you, my lord, ’he says, ’of the Emperor’s Eye, the Mud of Paris, the Sigh Supprest?’ He even orders me to have pantaloons of a reddish colour. ‘All on the reds now, my lord.’ It is even regulated whether the coat shall be worn open or buttoned, and if buttoned, whether by one button or two, and by which. Sometimes a cane is to be carried in the hand, sometimes a club, sometimes a common twig. Just recently it was the vogue for every man to walk the streets with his hands thrust into his coat pockets. The length of the neck handkerchief, the shape, the mode of tying it, must all be in the mode. There is a professor in Bond Street, who, in lessons, at half a guinea, instructs gentlemen in the art of tying their neck handkerchiefs in the newest and most approved style.”

  The door opened and Miss Tonks crept apologetically in. Her nose was red with cold and the hem of her gown was wet. Cassandra wondered if Miss Tonks had been foolish enough to venture to the outside privy in a snowstorm.

  But Miss Tonks had made use of the chamber-pot in her room but had then gone into an agony of debate with herself about what to do with the contents. Slops were expected to be left until the morning, when a servant carried them away. But it went against her fastidious soul to have such a thing in the bedchamber. She had opened the window to throw the contents out but had been driven back by the fury of the storm. She was too shy to summon a servant to perform the task for her and so, covering the chamber-pot with a linen cloth, she had crept downstairs and out into the howling whiteness of the inn yard and deposited the contents in a corner.

  “You are surely not drinking port on top of the wine we had for dinner, Cassandra,” she exclaimed. “Do, my lord, call for some soda water. I know gentlemen are accustomed to the Horrors”—the Horrors being the polite name for delirium tremens—“but it is not a suitable thing to happen to a lady.”

  Lord Eston sent for soda water and then suggested a game of cribbage. Cassandra, who was beginning to find his presence oppressive, opened her mouth to refuse but was forestalled by Miss Tonks, who quickly agreed. They played for pennies. Outside the inn, the world fell silent, enclosed and muffled in deep snow.

  At nine o’clock, Lord Eston suggested they retire for the night, twitching back the curtain as he spoke. In the light of the posting-house lamp swinging over the arched entrance he could see snow blowing in the wind.

  “We may as well settle down for a long siege,” he said. “I do not know when we will be able to travel again.”

  Miss Tonks bit back a moan. The diamonds in the foot of her trunk seemed to flash and burn in her guilty mind.

  Cassandra stood up and curtsied to Lord Eston and then hesitated in the doorway. “Is this a very expensive posting-house, my lord?”

  “I am afraid so. I will take care of your bills. And,” he added quickly, noticing the mulish tilt of that chin, “you may pay me when you can.”

  “I will pay you out of my wages,” said Cassandra proudly.

  “Oh, dear,” twittered Miss Tonks, “we do not actually take wages. But, my dear Lord Eston, I myself will settle the account out of my share of the profits.” A slow smile dawned on her thin face. “Goodness, I suddenly feel like a woman of business at last. Quite like Rothschild! Come, Cassandra.”

  The bad weather, not so dramatic in London as in the country, was nonetheless miserable enough to exacerbate tempers at the Poor Relation. Funds were running very low indeed and Despard, the cook, was performing miracles of cuisine with the most inexpensive ingredients, although such economies offended him greatly, prompting Sir Philip to say waspishly that there was no one more extravagant than a radical, “always so good at spending other people’s money.”

  Two of the unpaid waiters left for the new hotel, Tupple’s, which meant that Lady Fortescue and Colonel Sandhurst really had to wait table in the dining-room instead of just playing at it. Then two chambermaids left, and it fell to Mrs. Budley to turn her hand to cleaning and making beds. The fact that Sir Philip appeared to consider all work beneath him roused the ire of the others. All were working except him. Betty and John, Lady Fortescue’s old servants, who had hitherto had the luxury of only waiting on the poor relations, had to be delegated to the kitchen when two of Despard’s staff walked out. Tempers rose when Sir Philip informed them that he had called in at Tupple’s and found the late staff all appeared to be working there.

  “It is my belief they are luring them away in order to break us,” said Lady Fortescue. “Oh, for some money. Our credit is stretched to the limit.”

  “The day has been warmer,” said the colonel, “and the snow is beginning to melt. Perhaps Miss Tonks will be with us soon.”

  “Miss Tonks!” jeered Sir Philip. “She will eventually arrive back, twittering and apologizing and saying she just could not dare take anything.”

  “Matters might be helped if you did some work,” snapped the colonel. “Lady Fortescue is feeling exhausted with all the running up and down stairs.”

  “Lady Fortescue never runs,” pointed out Sir Philip. “She moves as stately as a flagship on a calm sea.” He leered roguishly at Lady Fortescue, who, to the colonel’s fury, smiled indulgently at the old horror.

  “I have been thinking,” said the colonel, “that perhaps if we sold this place, Lady Fortescue and I could retire to somewhere in the country.”

  “What?” demanded Sir Philip wrathfully. “This is her house to sell, not yours. Why should she want to bury herself in the country with an old stick like you anyway?”

  “I have discussed the matter with Colonel Sandhurst,” said Lady Fortescue. “Things are going from bad to worse. I am so very tired.”

  “I’ll work in the dining-room for you, dear lady,” said Sir Philip. “You have a few days’ rest. Leave it all to me.”

  “Thank you.” Lady Fortescue leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes.

  The colonel glared at Sir Philip. He himself had been working alongside Lady Fortescue, and yet she had thanked this old fright for volunteering to do what he should have been doing for days.

  If only Miss Tonks … But Miss Tonks! The colonel shook his head sadly. They should never have relied on her.

  Chapter Four

  The ruling passion, be it what it will,

  The ruling passion conquers reason still.

  —ALEXANDER POPE

  MISS TONKS and Cassandra, travelling in yet another postchaise, arrived on the outskirts of London two weeks after having been snow-bound at the posting-house.

  Miss Tonks’s rosy dreams of her triumphal arrival home were somewhat marred by a nagging worry. The day following their dinner with Lord Eston had been spent pleasantly in conversation and cards. Lord Eston and Cassandra appeared to be easy in each other’s company. Miss Tonks, despite her earlier misgivings about Lord Eston, began to hope that romance might blossom between the pair, that she might be able to achieve for Cassandra what her mother could not. But just before dinner, an elderly gentleman by the name of Sir Andrew Boyle had called. It transpired Sir Andrew was an old friend of Lord Eston’s family and lived at the manor-house near the posting-house. His servants, he said, had just cleared the drive and the snow had stopped falling. He urged Lord Eston to stay a
t the manor until the roads were clear enough for him to proceed on his journey. Sir Andrew added that his grand daughter, Amanda, grew more beautiful every day and would be delighted to see him. And to Miss Tonks’s surprise, Lord Eston had left, just like that.

  She was puzzled. He had not even introduced them to Sir Andrew. He had arranged that all their bills at the posting-house were to be forwarded to him. He did not say anything to Cassandra about wishing to see her again.

  Miss Tonks hung her head. It was all because they were both now in trade, she thought sadly. Obviously they were only good enough to amuse Lord Eston when he had no prospect of more fashionable company. Still, it was very lowering during their long stay at the posting-house to know that he was hard by at the manor and did not even trouble to call. She had finally kept her thoughts and speculations to herself because Cassandra would only laugh and say that obviously the charms of this Amanda were keeping him well occupied. Miss Tonks could not help remembering surprising an expression of warmth and affection on his face as Lord Eston had looked at Cassandra when she had had her head bent over the game of cribbage. He had not seemed at all high in the instep either, treating her, Miss Tonks, like an equal, paying their bills at the posting-house, not to mention having stolen the diamonds for her. So why had he left? Why, why, why?

  But soon they would be home, or what passed for home these days. She must not let Cassandra be there when she told the others about her great theft. Miss Tonks rubbed the glass of the post-chaise with her glove and looked out into the failing light. The amount of travellers on the Great Western Road never failed to amaze her: horsemen and footmen, carriages of every description and every shape, wagons and carts and covered carts, stagecoaches, long, square, and double coaches, chariots, chaises, gigs, buggies, curricles and phaetons. The sound of wheels ploughing through the wet gravel of the road was as constant and incessant as the roar of the waves on a pebble beach. Then suddenly the sharp thundery rumble of the post-chaise as the wheels left the gravel to lurch over the cobblestones of Hyde Park Corner. Just a little way to go now.