Lord John and the Private Matter Read online

  "Nor do you need to fear that I mean any harm to Mr. Trevelyan. He is about to become a part of my family, after all--perhaps you are aware that he is engaged to my cousin?"

  Caswell nodded, almost imperceptibly. His mouth was pursed so tightly that it resembled nothing so much as a dog's anus, which Grey thought very disagreeable. Still, it scarcely mattered what the evil old creature looked like, so long as he coughed up the necessary details.

  "I am sure you will understand that my efforts in this regard are intended solely to protect my family." Grey glanced away, toward a massive silver epergne filled with hothouse fruit, then back at Caswell. Time for the coup.

  "So, then," he said, spreading his hands with a graceful gesture. "It remains only to decide the price, does it not?"

  Caswell made a deep, catarrhal noise, and spat thickly into a new handkerchief, which he then balled up and cast into the fire after its fellows. Grey thought cynically that he must require a good deal of money merely to keep himself in linen.

  "The price." Caswell took a deep swallow of wine and put down the glass, licking his lips. "What do you have to offer? Always assuming that I have something to sell, mind."

  No more pretence of ignorance. The duel was over. Grey could not help a brief sigh, and was surprised to discover that not only were his palms damp but that he was sweating freely beneath his shirt, though the room was not warm.

  "I have money--" he began, but Caswell interrupted him.

  "Trevelyan gives me money. A lot of money. What else can you offer me?"

  The small black eyes were fixed on him, unblinking, and he saw the tip of Caswell's tongue steal out, barely visible, to lick away a drop of wine from the corner of his mouth.

  Sweet Jesus. He sat dumbstruck for an instant, caught in those eyes, then glanced down, as though suddenly remembering his own wine. He lifted his glass, lowering his lashes to hide his eyes.

  In defense of King, country, and family, he would unhesitatingly have sacrificed his virtue to Nessie, had that been required. If it was a question of Olivia marrying a man with syphilis and half the British army being exterminated in battle, versus himself experiencing a "personal interview" with Richard Caswell, though, he rather thought Olivia and the King had best look to their own devices.

  He put down his glass, hoping that this conclusion was not reflected upon his features.

  "I have something other than money," he said, meeting Caswell's gaze squarely. "Do you want to know how George Everett really died?"

  If there was a flicker of disappointment in those black marble orbs, it was swamped at once beneath a wave of interest. Caswell tried to hide it, but there was no disguising the glint of curiosity, mixed with avarice.

  "I heard that it was a hunting accident; broke his neck out in the country. Where was it? Wyvern?"

  "Francis Dashwood's place--Medmenham Abbey. It wasn't his neck, and it was no accident. He was killed on purpose--a sword-thrust through the heart. I was there."

  These last three words were dropped like pebbles into a lake; he could feel their impact send ripples through the air of the room. Caswell sat immobile, scarcely breathing, contemplating the possibilities.

  "Dashwood," he whispered at last. "The Hellfire Club?"

  Grey nodded. "I can tell you who was there--and everything that happened that night at Medmenham. Everything."

  Caswell fairly quivered with excitement, black eyes moist.

  George had been right. Caswell was one of those who loved secrets, who hoarded information, who kept confidential information for the sheer joy of knowing things that no one else knew. And when the time might come that such things could be sold for a profit . . .

  "Have we a bargain, Dickie?"

  That recalled Caswell somewhat to himself. He took a deep breath, coughed twice, and nodded, pushing back his chair.

  "That we have, my little love. Come along, then."

  The upper floors consisted mostly of private rooms; Grey couldn't tell whether much had been changed--he had been in no condition to notice very much on the occasions of his previous visits to Lavender House.

  Tonight was different; he noticed everything.

  It was peculiar, he thought, following Caswell through an upper hall. The feel of this house was quite different from that of the brothel, even though the purpose of the establishments was the same. He could hear music below, and intimate sounds in some of the rooms they passed--and yet it was not the same at all.

  Magda's brothel had been much more explicit, with everything in the place intended to provoke libidinous intent. No molly-house he had ever been in did such things--there was seldom any ornamentation, nor even much furnishing beyond the simplest of beds. Sometimes, not even that; many were no more than taverns, with a room opening off the main taproom, where men could repair for sport, often to the applause and shouted comments of onlookers in the tavern.

  He believed that even very poor brothels had doors. Was it that women insisted upon privacy, he wondered? Yet he doubted that many whores found stimulation in the sorts of objects Magda provided for the delectation of her customers. Perhaps there truly was a difference between men who were lured by women, and those who preferred the touch of their own sex? Or was it the women--did they perhaps require some decoration of the exchange?

  As far as sexual feeling went . . . this house fairly vibrated with it. There were male voices and the scents of men everywhere; two lovers embraced at the end of the corridor, entwined against a wall, and his own skin prickled and jumped; he could not stop sweating.

  Caswell led him to a staircase, past the lovers. One was Goldie-Locks, Neil the Cunt, who looked up, disheveled, mouth swollen, and gave him a languorous smile before returning to his companion--who was not the brown-haired lad. Grey carefully did not look back as they started up the stair.

  Things were quieter on the topmost floor of the house. The furnishing seemed more luxurious, as well; a wide oriental carpet ran the length of the corridor, and tasteful pictures decorated the walls, above small tables that held vases of flowers.

  "Up here, we have several suites of rooms; sometimes a gentleman will come in from the provinces to stay for a few days, a week . . ."

  "Quite the little home away from home. I see. And Trevelyan engages one of these suites now and again?"

  "Oh, no." Caswell stopped at a varnished door, and shook loose a large key from the bunch he carried. "He keeps this particular suite on a permanent basis."

  The door swung open on darkness, showing the pale rectangle of a window on the far wall. It had clouded over, and Grey could see the moon, now high and small in the sky, nearly lost amid layers of hazy cloud.

  Caswell had brought a taper; he touched it to a candlestick near the door, and the light caught and grew, shedding a wavering light over a large room with a canopied bed. The room was clean and empty; Grey breathed in, but smelled nothing other than wax and floor polish, with a faint whiff of long-dead fires. The hearth was freshly swept, and a fire laid, but the room was cold; clearly no one had been here recently.

  Grey prowled the room, but there was no evidence of its occupants.

  "Does he entertain the same companion each time?" he asked. The keeping of a suite argued some long-term affair.

  "Yes, I believe he does." There was an odd tone in Caswell's voice that made him glance sharply at the man.

  "You believe? You have not seen his companion?"

  "No--he is very particular, our Mr. Trevelyan." Caswell's voice was ironic. "He always arrives first, changes his clothes, and then goes down to wait near the door. He brings his companion in and up the stairs at once; all the servants have instructions to be elsewhere."

  That was a disappointment. He had hoped for a name. Still, a tendency to thoroughness made him turn back to Caswell, probing for further information.

  "I am sure your servants are meticulous in observing your instructions," he said. "But you, Dickie? Surely you don't expect me to believe that anyone comes into y
our house without your finding out everything there is to know about them. You've only heard my Christian name before, to my knowledge--and yet, if you know about Trevelyan's engagement to my cousin, plainly you know who I am."

  "Oh, yes--my lord." Caswell smiled, lips drawn into a puckish point. The bargain struck, he was enjoying his revelations as much as he had his earlier reticence.

  "You are right, to a degree. In fact, I do not know the name of Mr. Trevelyan's inamorata; he is very careful. I do, however, know one rather important thing about her."

  "Which is?"

  "That she is an inamorata--rather than an inamorato."

  Grey stared at him for an instant, deciphering this.

  "What? Trevelyan is meeting a woman? A real woman? Here?"

  Caswell inclined his head, hands folded gravely at his waist like a butler.

  "How do you know?" Grey demanded. "Are you sure?"

  The candlelight danced like laughter in Caswell's small black eyes.

  "Ever smelt a woman? Close to, I mean." Caswell shook his head, the loose folds of skin on his neck quivering with the movement. "Let alone a room where someone's been swiving one of the creatures for hours on end. Of course I'm sure."

  "Of course you are," Grey murmured, repelled by the mental image of Caswell nosing ratlike through sheets and pillows in the vacated rooms of his house, pilfering crumbs of information from the rubble left by careless love.

  "She has dark hair," Caswell offered helpfully. "Nearly black. Your cousin is fair, I believe?"

  Grey didn't bother answering that.

  "And?" he asked tersely.

  Caswell pursed his lips, considering.

  "She wears considerable paint--but I cannot say, of course, whether that is her normal habit, or part of the guise she adopts when coming here."

  Grey nodded, taking the point. Those mollies who liked to dress as women normally were painted like French noblewomen; a woman hoping to be mistaken for one would likely do the same.

  "And?"

  "She wears a very expensive scent. Civet, vetiver, and orange, if I am not mistaken." Caswell cast his eyes up toward the ceiling, considering. "Oh, yes--she has a taste for that German wine I gave you."

  "You said you kept it for a member. Trevelyan, I presume? How do you know it isn't he alone who drinks it?"

  Caswell's hairy nostrils quivered with amusement.

  "A man who drank as much as is brought up to this suite would be incapable for days. And judging from the evidence"--he nodded delicately at the bed--"our Mr. Trevelyan is far from incapable."

  "She arrives by sedan chair?" Grey asked, ignoring the allusion.

  "Yes. Different bearers each time, though; if she keeps men of her own, she does not use them when coming here--which argues a high degree of discretion, does it not?"

  A lady with a good deal to lose, were the affaire discovered. But the intricacy of Trevelyan's arrangements was sufficient to tell him that already.

  "And that is all I know," Caswell said, in tones of finality. "Now, as to your part of the bargain, my lord? . . ."

  His mind still reeling from the shock of revelation, Grey recalled his promise to Tom Byrd and gathered sufficient wits to ask one more question, pulled almost at random from the swirl of fact and speculation that presently inhabited his cranium.

  "All you know about the woman. About Mr. Trevelyan, though--have you ever seen a man with him, a servant? Somewhat taller than myself, lean-faced and dark, with a missing eyetooth on the left side?"

  Caswell looked surprised.

  "A servant?" He frowned, ransacking his memory. "No. I . . . no, wait. Yes . . . yes, I believe I have seen the man, though I think he has come only once." He looked up, nodding with decision.

  "Yes, that was it; he came to fetch his master, with a note of some kind--some emergency to do with business, I think. I sent him down to the kitchens to wait for Trevelyan--he was comely enough, tooth or no, but I rather thought he was not disposed to such sport as he might encounter abovestairs."

  Tom Byrd would be relieved to hear that expert opinion, Grey thought.

  "When was this? Do you recall?"

  Caswell's lips puckered in thought, causing Grey briefly to avert his glance.

  "In late April, I think it was, though I cannot--oh. Yes, I can be sure." He grinned, triumphantly displaying a set of decaying teeth. "That was it. He brought word of the Austrian defeat at Prague, arrived by special courier. The newspapers had it within days, but naturally Mr. Trevelyan would wish to know of it at once."

  Grey nodded. For a man with Trevelyan's business interests, information like that would be worth its weight in gold--or even more, depending on its timeliness.

  "One last thing, then. When he left so hastily--did the woman leave then, too? And did she go with him, rather than seeking separate transport?"

  Caswell was obliged to ponder that one for a moment, leaning against the wall.

  "Ye-es, they did leave together," he said at last. "I seem to recall that the servant ran off to fetch a hired carriage, and they entered it together. She'd a shawl over her head. Quite small, though; I might easily have taken her for a boy--save that her figure was quite rounded."

  Caswell drew himself up straight then, and cast a last glance about the vacant room, as though to satisfy himself that it would yield no further secrets.

  "Well, that's my end of the bargain kept, my love. And yours?" His hand hovered over the candlestick, scrawny claw poised to pinch out the flame. Grey saw the polished obsidian eyes fix on him in invitation, and was all too conscious of the large bed, close behind him.

  "Of course," Grey said, moving purposefully toward the door. "Shall we adjourn to your office?"

  Caswell's expression might have been termed a pout, had he had the fullness of lip to achieve such a thing.

  "If you insist," he said with a sigh, and extinguished the candle in a burst of fragrant smoke.

  Dawn was beginning to lighten over the housetops of London by the time Grey left Dickie Caswell's sanctum, alone. He paused at the end of the corridor, resting his forehead against the cool glass of the casement, watching the City as it emerged by imperceptible degrees from its cloak of night. Muted by clouds that had thickened during the night, the light grew in shades of gray, relieved only by the faintest tinge of pink over the distant Thames. In his present state of mind, it reminded Grey of the last vestiges of life fading from a corpse's cheeks.

  Caswell had been delighted with his half of the bargain, as well he should be. Grey had held back nothing of his Medmenham adventures, save the name of the man who had actually killed George Everett. There, he said only that the man had been robed and masked; impossible to say for sure who it had been.

  He felt no compunction in thus blackening George's name; to his manner of thinking, George had accomplished that reasonably well for himself--and if a posthumous revelation of his actions could help to save the innocent, that might compensate in some small way for the innocent lives Everett had taken or ruined as the price of his ambition.

  As for Dashwood and the others . . . let them look to themselves. He who sups wi' the De'il, needs bring a lang spoon. Grey smiled faintly, hearing the Scots proverb in memory. Jamie Fraser had said it on the occasion of their first meal together--casting Grey as the Devil, he supposed, though he had not asked.

  Grey was not a religious man, but he harbored a persistent vision: an avenging angel presiding over a balance on which the deeds of a man's life were weighed--the bad to one side, the good to the other--and George Everett stood before the angel naked, bound and wide-eyed, waiting to see where the wavering balance might finally come to rest. He hoped this night's work should be laid to George's credit, and wondered briefly how long the accounting might go on, if it was true that a man's deeds lived after him.

  Jamie Fraser had told him once of purgatory, that Catholic conception of a place prior to final judgment, where souls remained for a time after death, and where the fate of a soul might
still be affected by the prayers and Masses said for it. Perhaps it was true; a place where the soul waited, while each action taken during life played itself out, the unexpected consequences and complications following one another like a collapsing chain of dominoes down through the years. But that would imply that a man was responsible not only for his conscious actions, but for all the good and evil that might spring from them forever, unintended and unforeseen; a terrible thought.

  He straightened, feeling at once drained and keyed up. He was exhausted, but completely awake--in fact, sleep had never seemed so far away. Every nerve was raw, and all his muscles ached with unrelieved tension.

  The house lay silent around him, its inhabitants still sleeping the drugged sleep of wine and sated sensuality. Rain began to fall, the soft ping of raindrops striking the glass accompanied by a harsh, fresh scent that came cold through the cracks of the casement, cutting through the stale air of the house and through the fog that filled his brain.

  "Nothing like a long walk home in a driving rain to clear the cobwebs," he murmured to himself. He had left his hat somewhere--perhaps in the library--but felt no desire to go in search of it. He made his way to the stair, down to the second floor, and along the gallery toward the main staircase that would take him down to the door.

  The door of one of the rooms on the gallery was open, and as he passed by, a shadow fell across the boards at his feet. He glanced up and met the eye of a young man who lounged in the doorway, clad in nothing but his shirt, dark curls loose upon his shoulders. The young man's eyes, black and long-lashed, passed over him, and he felt the heat of them on his skin.

  He made as though to go by, but the young man reached out and grasped him by the arm.

  "Come in," the young man said softly.

  "No, I--"

  "Come. For a moment only."

  The young man stepped out onto the gallery, his bare feet long and graceful, standing so close that his thigh pressed Grey's. He leaned forward, and the warmth of his breath brushed Grey's ear, the tip of his tongue touched the whorl of it with a crackling sound like the spark that springs from the fingers on a dry day when metal is touched.

  "Come," he murmured, and stepped backward, drawing Grey after him into the room.

  It was clean and plainly furnished, but he saw nothing save the dark eyes, so close, and the hand that moved from his arm, sliding down to entwine its fingers with his own, the swarthiness of it startling by contrast with his own fairness, the palm broad and hard against his.