Lord John And The Hand Of Devils

Page 27

“Your pardon, sir; it’s Captain Fanshawe come.”
The choler left the Reverend’s face at once.
“Oh,” he said. He glanced quickly at Grey, then at the doorway. Grey could see the figure of a tall man, standing in the hallway just beyond the maid.
“Captain Fanshawe … would that be Captain Marcus Fanshawe, perhaps?” Grey asked politely. “I believe we are members of the same club.” He’d met the man briefly on that last, riotous visit to White’s, he thought.
The minister nodded like a clockwork doll, but looked back and forth between Grey and the doorway, exhibiting marked perplexity and what looked like embarrassment.
Grey was somewhat perplexed himself. He was also angry with himself for having allowed his personal opinions to intrude on the conversation. No help now but to retreat in good order, perhaps leaving enough goodwill to provide for another visit later. He rose and bowed.
“I thank you for receiving me, sir. I can show myself out.”
The Reverend Mr. Thackeray and the maid both gave sharp gasps as he strode through the door, and the minister made a brief movement as though to prevent him, but Grey ignored it.
The man in the hall was dressed in ordinary riding clothes, his hat in his hand. He turned sharply at Grey’s appearance, surprised.
Grey nodded toward the newcomer, hoping that his face did not reveal the shock he felt at Fanshawe’s appearance. It was the sort of face that drew both men and women, dark and arresting in its beauty—or had been. One eye remained, sapphire-colored, dark-lashed, and framed by an arch of black brow, a perfect jewel.
The other was invisible, whether injured or destroyed, he had no idea. A black silk scarf was bound across Fanshawe’s brow, a bar sinister whose starkness cut across a mass of melted, lividly welted flesh. The nose was mostly gone; only the blunt darkness of the nostrils remained. He had the horrid fancy that they stared, inviting him—almost compelling him—to look through them into Fanshawe’s brain.
“Your servant, sir,” he heard himself say, bowing automatically.
“And yours.”
Had he ever heard Fanshawe’s voice before? It was colorless, correct, with the slightest tinge of Sussex. Fanshawe turned at a sound from the parlor door, and Grey felt suddenly faint. Part of the captain’s head had been caved in, leaving a shocking depression above the ear, nearly a quarter of the skull … gone. How had he lived?
Grey bowed again, murmuring something meaningless, and escaped, finding himself in the road without noticing how he had got there.
His heart was beating fast and he felt the taste of bile at the back of his throat. He tried to erase the vision of Fanshawe’s head from his mind, but it was no use. The ruined face was terrible to look upon, and filled him with a piercing regret for the loss of beauty—though he had seen such things before. But that sickening place, where the eye expected a solid curve of skull and found emptiness instead, was peculiarly shocking, even to a professional soldier.
He stood still, eyes closed, and breathed slowly, concentrating on the sharp autumnal odors round him: chimney smoke and the sweet scent of windfall apples, rotting in the grass; damp earth and dead leaves, the bitter smell of hawthorn fruits, cut straw, used to mulch the flower beds in Thackeray’s garden. Soap—
Soap? His eyes flew open and he saw that the branches of the hedgerow beside him were heaving.
“Psst!” said the hedge.
“I beg your pardon?” he replied, leaning to look closer. Through the spiny branches of a hawthorn, he made out the anxious face of a young woman, perhaps eighteen or so, whose large, prominent eyes and upturned nose betrayed a close resemblance to the pug-like Mr. Thackeray.
“May I speak to you, sir?” she said, eyes imploring.
“I believe you are, madam, but if you wish to continue doing so, perhaps it would be easier were I to meet you yonder?” He nodded down the road, to a gap where there was a gate set into the hedge.
The clean-smelling young woman met him there, her face pink with cold air and flusterment.
“You will think me forward, sir, but I—Oh, and I do apologize, sir, but I couldn’t help overhearing, and when you spoke to Father about Annie …”
“I collect you are … Miss Thackeray?”
“Oh, I am sorry, sir.” She bobbed him an anxious curtsy, her ruffled cap clean and white, like a fresh mushroom. “I am Barbara Thackeray. My sister is Miss Thackeray—or—or was,” she corrected, blushing deeply.
“Is your sister deceased, then?” Grey inquired, as gently as possible. “Or married?”
“Oh, sir!” She gave him a wide-eyed look. “I do hope she is married, and not—not the other. She wrote to me, and said she and Philip meant to be married ever so soon as they might. She is a good girl, Annie; you must not pay attention to anyone who tells you otherwise, indeed you must not!” She looked quite fierce at this, like a small pug dog seizing the edge of a carpet in its teeth, and he nearly laughed, but stopped himself in time.
“She wrote to you, you say?” He glanced involuntarily back at the house, and she correctly interpreted the look.
“She sent a letter in care of Simon Coles, the lawyer. He is—a friend.” Her color deepened. “It was but a brief note, to assure me of her welfare. But I have heard nothing since. And when we heard that Philip—that Lieutenant Lister—was killed … Oh, my fears for her will destroy me, sir, pray believe me!”
She looked so distressed that Grey had no difficulty in believing her, and so assured her.
“May I—may I ask, sir, why you have come?” she asked, pinkening further. “You do not know anything of Anne, yourself?”
“No. I came in hopes of learning something regarding her whereabouts. You are familiar with Lieutenant Lister’s family, I collect?”
She nodded, brows knit.
“Well, Mr. Lister is most desirous of discovering your sister’s current circumstances, and offering what assistance he might, for his son’s sake,” he said carefully. He really did not know whether Lister would be interested in helping the young woman if she had not given birth to Philip Lister’s child, but there was no point in mentioning that possibility.
“Oh,” she breathed, a slight look of hope coming into her face. “Oh! So you are a friend of Mr. Lister’s? It was wise of you not to tell Father so. He holds the Listers responsible entirely for my sister’s disgrace … and in all truth,” she added, with a trace of bitterness, “I cannot say he is wrong to do so. If only Marcus … He would have quit the army for Anne’s sake, I know he would. And of course now he is invalided out, but …”
“Captain Fanshawe was an—a suitor of Miss Thackeray’s?” Grey said, hastily substituting that term for the more vulgar “admirer.”
Barbara Thackeray nodded, looking troubled.
“Oh, yes. He and Philip both wished to marry her. My sister could not choose between them, and my father disliked them equally, because of their profession. But then—” She glanced back at the house, involuntarily. “Did you see Marcus?”
“Yes,” Grey said, unable to repress a small shiver of revulsion. “What happened to him?”
She shuddered in sympathy.
“Is it not terrible? He will not allow me or my younger sisters to see him, save he is masked. But Shelby—the parlor maid—told me what he is like. It was an explosion.”
“What—a cannon?” Grey asked, with a certain feeling of nightmare. She shook her head, though.
“No, sir. The Fanshawes own a powder mill, by the river. One of the buildings went—they do, you know, every so often; we hear the bang sometimes, in the distance, so dreadful! Two workmen were killed; Marcus lived, though everyone says it would have been a mercy had he not.”
Shortly after this tragedy, Philip Lister had eloped with Anne Thackeray, and bar that one short note, evidently nothing further was known of her whereabouts.
“She said that Philip had found her a suitable lodging in Southwark, and that the landlady was most obliging. Is that a help?” Barbara asked hopefully.
“It may be.” Grey tried not to imagine how many obliging landladies there might be in Southwark. “Do you know—did your sister take away any jewelry with her?” The first—perhaps the only—thing a young woman left suddenly destitute might do was to pawn or sell her jewelry. And there might be fewer pawnbrokers in Southwark than landladies.
“Well … yes. At least … I suppose she did.” She looked doubtful. “I could look. Her things … Father wished to dispose of them, and had them packed up, but I—well, I could not bear to part with them.” She blushed, looking down. “I … persuaded Simon to speak to the drover who took away the boxes; they are in his shed, I believe.”
A distant shout made her look over her shoulder, startled.
“They are looking for me. I must go,” she said, already gathering her skirts for flight. “Where do you stay, sir?”
“At Blackthorn Hall,” Grey said. “Edgar DeVane is my brother.”
Her eyes flew wide at that, and he saw her look closely at him for the first time, blinking.
“He is?”
“My half brother,” he amended dryly, seeing that she was taken slightly back by his appearance.
“Oh! Yes,” she said uncertainly, but then her face changed as another shout came from the direction of the house. “I must go. I will send to you about the jewelry. And thank you, sir, ever so much!”
She gave him a quick, low curtsy, then picked up her skirts and fled, gray-striped stockings flashing as she ran.
“Hmm!” he said. Used as he was to general approbation of his person, he was amused to discover that his vanity was mildly affronted at her plain astonishment that such an insignificant sort as himself should be brother to the darkly dramatic Edgar DeVane. He laughed at himself, and turned back toward the spot where he had left Edgar’s horse, swishing his stick through the hedge as he passed.
Despite her rather prominent eyes and her lack of appreciation for his own appearance, he liked Barbara Thackeray. So, obviously, did Simon Coles. He hoped Coles was a more acceptable candidate for marriage than Lister or Fanshawe had been, for the young woman’s sake.
He rather thought he must go and speak to lawyer Coles. Because while Barbara had received only the one note from her sister, both her father and Mr. Lister appeared to believe that Anne had later borne a child. It was possible, he thought, that Simon Coles knew why.
He was not sure what he had expected of Simon Coles, but the reality was different. The lawyer was a slight young man, with sandy hair, a sprinkling of freckles across a thin, homely face, and a withered leg.
“Lord John Grey … Major Grey?” he exclaimed, leaning eagerly forward over his desk. “But I know you—know of you, I should say,” he corrected himself.
“You do?” Once again, Grey found himself uneasy at being the unwitting subject of conversation. Perhaps Edgar had mentioned his impending arrival; he had sent a note ahead to Blackthorn Hall.
“Yes, yes! I am sure of it! Let me show you.” Reaching for the padded crutch that leaned against the wall, he tucked it deftly beneath one arm and swung himself out from behind the desk, heading so briskly for the bookshelves across the room that Grey was obliged to step out of the way.
“Now where …?” the lawyer murmured, running a finger across a row of books. “Ah, yes, just here, just here!”
Pulling down a large double folio, he bundled it across to the desk, where he flung it open and flicked the pages, revealing it to be a sort of compendium, wherein Grey recognized accounts from various newspapers, carefully cut out and pasted onto the pages. For variety, he glimpsed a number of illustrated broadsheets, and even a few ballad sheets, tucked amongst the pages.
“There! I knew it must be the same, though Grey is not an uncommon name. The circumstances, though—I daresay you found those sufficiently uncommon, did you not, Major?” He looked up with sparkling eyes, his finger planted on a cutting.
Unwilling, Grey felt still compelled to look, and was mortified to read a recently published and highly colored account of his saving a cannon—the gun reported as being named “Tod Belcher”—from the hands of a ravening horde of Austrians after the tragic and untimely demise of the gun’s captain. He, Grey, having personally swept an oncoming Austrian cavalry officer from his saddle, then pinned him to the ground with his sword through the officer’s coat, demanded and accepted his surrender, and then (by report) had fought the gun virtually single-handed, the rest of the crew having been slain by the accident which took the life of “Philbert Lester,” the doomed captain, whose detached limbs had been scattered to the four winds, and his bowels torn out. Rather oddly, the explosion of the cannon that had concluded this remarkable passage at arms was treated in a single offhand sentence.
Whoever had written this piece of bombast had managed, to Grey’s amazement, both to spell his own name correctly—scarcely a blessing, in the circumstances—and to note that the event had occurred in Germany.
“But Mr. Coles!” Grey said, aghast. “This—this—it is the most arrant poppycock!”
“Oh, now, Major, you must not be modest,” Coles assured him, wringing him by the hand. “You must not seek to lessen the honor your presence grants to my office, you know!”
He laughed merrily, and Grey, with a feeling of helplessness, found himself obliged to smile and bow in an awkward parody of graciousness.
Coles’s clerk, a youth named Boggs, was summoned in to meet the hero of Crefeld, then sent off in a state of wide-eyed excitement to fetch refreshment—against Grey’s protests—from the local ordinary. Where, Grey reflected grimly, he was no doubt presently recounting the whole idiotic story to anyone who would listen. He resolved to finish his business in Mudling Parva as quickly as possible, and decamp back to London before Edgar and Maude got wind of the newspaper story.