Chapter 19

 

In Which Two Unwelcome Visitors Descend upon Curzon Street

 

As it happened, Lady Stapleton was not the only visitor to Curzon Street that day. Nor, for that matter, was she the most interesting. The afternoon saw the return of Mr. Mathers, still intent on purchasing the property in New South Wales, for which, he said, he was now prepared to give twenty-five pounds.

“As I told you before,” Pickett said with rather less courtesy than he had shown on that persistent gentleman’s earlier visits, “I haven’t had time to decide what to do with the property. I only became aware of its existence yesterday, and in addition to settling my father’s affairs, I live in daily expectation of my wife’s confinement with our first child. So as you can see, it isn’t a good time—”

Far from being repelled by this revelation, Mr. Mathers, undaunted, greeted the news of Pickett’s impending fatherhood with an enthusiasm bordering on delirium.

“Allow me to extend my heartiest congratulations!” he exclaimed, grabbing Pickett’s hand and pumping it with enthusiasm. “But only think of what twenty-five pounds would mean to you and your growing family!”

In fact, this argument touched Pickett on the raw, for he knew quite well what twenty-five pounds would mean. Indeed, he sometimes lay awake at night on his uncomfortable bed, speculating as to how much it would cost to educate a boy in a manner worthy of that boy’s mother, or to provide a girl with a dowry sufficient to make it possible for her to marry back into the class her mother had given up when she’d married him.

Mr. Mathers, taking Pickett’s silence for encouragement, judged it time to increase his offer. “I can see you drive a hard bargain, Mr. Pickett,” he said, wagging his head in the manner of one forced to surrender to the inevitable. “Thirty pounds, then.”

“I told you, I’m not ready to—”

“Oh, very well. Forty pounds, and that’s my final offer!”

Pickett made no answer. From where he stood in the drawing room (for he had quite deliberately not invited his unwanted guest to take a seat) he had glimpsed Rogers crossing the foyer, and cast the butler a look of such desperate entreaty that that excellent servant, sizing up the situation at a glance, stepped in and took control. Within minutes, and without knowing quite how it had happened Mr. Mathers was accepting his hat and gloves from the butler and stepping out onto the portico.

“Thank you,” Pickett said with feeling, as soon as Rogers had closed the door behind the departing caller. “If that man shows his face here again, deny him the house!”

“Have no fear, sir,” Rogers said, his usually impassive countenance betraying a gleam of anticipation, “I know just how to deal with such ill-bred persons as Mr. Mathers.”

“I knew you would. I’m obliged to you, Rogers.”

But even Rogers was unprepared for dealing with the next visitor to Curzon Street.

* * *

“Hssst!”

Roused from a deep sleep and a dream in which Julia was in the throes of childbirth while he was prevented from going to fetch the midwife by the relentless Mr. Mathers, who stood in the doorway making ever higher offers for the property and refusing to let him pass, Pickett became aware of someone shaking him by the shoulder. Wakening with an effort, he saw Rogers bending over him with a glowing candle in a tall brass candlestick, his black coat thrown over a nightshirt stuffed into the waist of his black breeches.

“Rogers?” Pickett mumbled sleepily. “What—”

“Shhh!” There was something of urgency in the way Rogers pressed his finger to his lips, enjoining silence. Whatever the butler’s reason for his waking his master in the middle of the night, he clearly did not intend for his mistress’s slumber to be disturbed by it.

“What is it, Rogers?” asked Pickett, lowering his voice to a near whisper.

“There is someone in the house, sir,” Rogers answered in kind.

Through the fog of sleep, Pickett was conscious of a feeling of annoyance. Of course there was someone in the house; Rogers need not wake him up for that. Besides himself and Julia and the butler, there was Kit, and Thomas the valet, and Julia’s lady’s maid Betsy, and Andrew the footman, and Cook, and—

Suddenly the fog lifted, and the butler’s meaning became clear. Pickett sat bolt upright, almost overturning the camp bed and himself with it. “Someone in the house?” he hissed, casting a cautious glance at the bed where Julia lay sleeping. “Are you sure?” Even as he asked the question, he acknowledged that Rogers was unlikely to be mistaken about such a matter. “Never mind, you can tell me about it in a minute.”

As he spoke the words, Pickett pulled on the breeches he had taken off only a few hours earlier and buttoned the fall front over the tails of his nightshirt, this latter garment, with which he usually dispensed, being a necessity, now that he was denied the warmth of Julia’s body beside him. Eschewing cravat and waistcoat, he shrugged into his plum-colored tailcoat and wished his biscuit-colored breeches were not of so light a hue. There was nothing to be done about them, but he could at least cover his white shirtfront by buttoning his coat over it.

Having made these preparations, he crossed the dark room to the clothespress and opened its doors, then stooped to pull out the bottom drawer. From its depths he withdrew a pistol. With this in his hand, he stood and motioned for Rogers to follow him. Outside in the corridor, he closed the door on his slumbering bride and turned to the butler.

“What’s happened?”

“I was awakened by a noise, and lay awake trying to identify it, or perhaps hear it again, when I saw a figure pass before my open door. He was dressed all in black, and carried a dark lantern with its shutter open just enough to light his passage.”

From his own brief stint as a footman, Pickett knew that most servants slept in shared chambers in the attic, but the highest figures in the servants’ hierarchy, primarily the butler and the housekeeper, had private rooms in the basement.

“So this person must have got in through the service entrance, or else the window that looks down on it,” Pickett observed.

“Very likely, sir. I daresay that was the noise that woke me. I did not take the time to go and investigate. I thought it best to see where he was going, and then come to inform you as soon as I could do so without putting him on his guard. I lay in bed feigning sleep until he was well past my room, then rose from my bed, scrambled into my clothes, and followed him from a safe distance. He went down the corridor to the kitchen, then started up the servants’ stair. At that point, I came to warn you.”

“The servants’ stair?” Pickett echoed in bewilderment, fixing on what was to him the most pertinent point in Rogers’s account. “Where the devil was he going?”

Rogers shook his head. “I couldn’t say, sir.”

Pickett cast a speculative glance up toward the upper floors. From the servants’ stair, the intruder could access any other floor in the house through the cleverly concealed jib doors that opened directly onto the family’s rooms—including the one right behind him, where Julia lay sleeping. He wrestled with indecision. He couldn’t go through that door in pursuit of the intruder, for he wouldn’t know whether to go up the stairs or down. But nor could he go down to the kitchen and follow the intruder all the way all up the servants’ stair from its base, leaving Julia alone, oblivious and unprotected. It would help, of course, if he knew the fellow’s intentions, but failing that…

“I’m going downstairs,” he told Rogers, his mind made up. “I want you to stay here and guard the jib door. If anyone opens it—anyone at all—don’t hesitate.” He jerked his head in the direction of the heavy brass candlestick in the butler’s hand. “Crown him with that thing.”

“You may count on me, sir,” Rogers said with relish.

Not until Rogers was installed at his post did Pickett realize that the only light had been supplied by the butler’s candle. Now that he was alone in the corridor the blackness was almost complete. He told himself it was better this way, since it would allow him to pursue the intruder without betraying his own presence. He had lived in the house for nine months—surely long enough for him to be able to find his way in the dark. Bolstered by this thought, he trod barefooted all the way down the stairs to the basement, from the carpeted treads of the upper floors through the green baize door and down the uncarpeted stairs that opened onto the kitchen, groping his way one cautious step at a time. Having reached the lowest level without encountering the intruder—or, indeed, anyone else—he began to climb, his ears straining to hear any sound from above that would betray his quarry’s presence.

As he passed each floor, he grew more puzzled. It was not that he wanted the fellow to enter Julia’s room by stealth; on the other hand, as he passed the door where Rogers waited on the other side with candlestick in hand, with still no sign of the man whose footsteps he fancied he could sometimes hear some distance ahead of him on the stairs, he had to wonder what the deuce the fellow was after. The silver was below stairs in the butler’s pantry, and the ready money needed for running the household or paying the servants’ wages was locked in a desk in the ground floor study, while his wife’s jewelry—and her far more valuable person—was in the room whose jib door he had just passed.

He paused and peered ahead as far as he could see in the darkness, considering the remaining floors. The schoolroom could hold nothing to interest a grown man—unless it was Kit, sought by someone of the criminal classes, someone like the men who had used the boy to squeeze through the windows that were too tight for an adult…

But no, he decided this scenario was highly unlikely. Anyone who moved in the same circles as the recently executed Rogers and Jud would have heard by now that Kit had a well-connected guardian in the form of his elder half-brother, who in addition to having been a Bow Street Runner, was on the friendliest of terms with the Bow Street magistrate, Patrick Colquhoun.

Besides, he thought on a purely practical level, any ten-year-old boy being unwillingly spirited away in the middle of the night would howl like the very devil.

Still, it was with a sense of relief mixed with bewilderment that he passed the door opening onto Kit’s bedroom—relief because it appeared that whatever the intruder was after, Kit was not it, and bewilderment because there remained only the attic floor comprising the servants’ bedrooms and a small box-room used for storage—the same room, in fact, where the despised camp bed had been unearthed. Pickett thought it a great pity that the intruder had not come a month earlier, when he might have had it and welcome.

Still, the box-room seemed so unlikely an objective that he was still puzzling over it when he turned the half-landing and almost walked right into his quarry in the dark. He took a cautious step backwards, intending to make a silent retreat to the next floor down; he would much prefer to discover what the intruder was about and catch him in the act than to confront him on a staircase, and from the lower and more vulnerable position at that.

Alas, the uncarpeted board creaked beneath his weight. The intruder whirled about, dropping his shuttered lantern and in the same swift motion planting his foot in Pickett’s chest and giving a hard shove.

Pickett contrived to regain his footing before he had fallen more than three or four steps, but his abrupt and ungainly descent, swift as it was, gave his adversary the few seconds he needed. Ignoring the pain in his chest, Pickett scrambled to the top of the steps and paused there to listen for some sign of his quarry.

“You there!” he shouted, leveling his pistol in the direction of the footsteps pounding down the corridor. “Halt, in the name of—”

In the name of the King. He broke off, annoyed with himself for resorting to the familiar cry of all those charged with enforcing the law, from the elderly Charlies in their boxes to the principal officers of Bow Street, among whose number he could no longer be counted. He might no longer be a Bow Street Runner, Pickett resolved, following at a run the footsteps that gave no indication of slowing, but he was something more dangerous still: a man defending his family after his home has been breached.

“Stop…stop or I’ll shoot!” His ribs burned like fire—he wondered if one was cracked—and he hated the breathlessness in his voice.

The only response was the groan of stiff hinges and, a moment later, a dull thud as the trapdoor opening onto the roof was thrown back. Pickett aimed and fired. A muffled curse, choked with pain, seemed to indicate that he had found his mark.

Unfortunately, this led to an entirely new set of problems. A feminine scream pierced the darkness, and every door on the attic corridor flew open.

“Mr. Pickett, sir? Is that you?” Pickett recognized the voice of his valet, Thomas.

Andrew, the footman, was more direct. “What the devil was that?”

“We’re going to be murdered in our beds!” moaned Julia’s maid, Betsy.

“Shhh!” Pickett instinctively held up his hand for silence, although no one could see it in the dark. “Listen!”

Surprisingly, they did. A shuffling sound at the end of the corridor accompanied by the faint creak of weight-bearing wood suggested that whatever injuries Pickett’s gunshot might have inflicted, it was not so serious as to prevent the intruder from climbing the ladder through the trapdoor to the roof. Pickett was slightly relieved that he would not be called upon to explain to the nearest constable just how the man had met his death at the hands of a former Bow Street Runner, but he was not so relieved that he intended to let the fellow escape.

“Housebreaker,” he said curtly in answer to the servants’ questions, then hurried toward the trapdoor as quickly as his aching ribs would allow.

Thomas fell into step behind him. “I’ll come with you, sir,” he declared, although whether this was due to loyalty toward his master or a young man’s love of adventure was perhaps a question best not examined too closely.

“Wait!” cried Andrew, nothing loth. “I’m coming, too!”

Pickett hadn’t the breath to argue with them. Alas, it soon transpired that he hadn’t the breath to climb the ladder, either. By the time he reached the third rung, he was gasping with the effort to draw air into his bruised lungs, and when he couldn’t summon the strength to hoist himself up to the fourth, he was forced to yield his place on the ladder to the two young men in his employ.

After urging Betsy to go back to bed (albeit without any noticeable degree of success), he waited at the foot of the ladder awaiting his servants’ return. They were not long in coming, but the dejected looks on the two faces, seen by the light of Betsy’s candle, told their own tale.

“I’m afraid we lost him, sir,” Thomas said, painfully aware of having disappointed the master who had raised him from the ranks of footmen to the rarified heights of gentleman’s gentlemen.

“There’s not much of a moon tonight, and he was all dressed in black,” Andrew said, apparently feeling some justification of their failure was called for.

“Never mind,” Pickett told them. “You did your best.”

“Yes, but—sir, who was he?” asked Thomas, fearful that he was overstepping, but too curious to resist. “What was he doing here?”

“I’m afraid your guess is as good as mine,” Pickett said. “According to Rogers, he entered the house through the basement, then started up the servants’ stair. I followed him all the way up, and he never made the slightest attempt to steal anything, or even enter any of the rooms at all. In any case, it looks like the excitement is over, so we all might as well go back to bed and get what sleep we can.”

And that, he thought, is going to prove a lot easier said than done.