Celeste Bradley - [The Liar's Club 02] (7 page)

In her own mind, she considered Bea’s daily climb something of a constitutional. Such exertion could only benefit someone so sedentary of habit.

When she saw no reaction, Bea snapped her handkerchief down and dispensed with the dramatics. “Well, I see you’re up and about already.”

“Indeed. I’ve already been for a walk. How are you this fine morning?”

It wasn’t morning any longer, for the clock had since struck two, but Clara saw no sense in encouraging Bea to rise any earlier than absolutely necessary. The morning hours when she had the house to herself were far too precious.

“Humph. I suppose you went shopping while you were out? Wasting more money on ink and such for your silly scribbles?”

“’Tis my money to spend as I please, Bea. I had another … investment pay off recently.”

“Well, if you’ve money to throw away, you might consider helping with the household expenses. I vow I don’t know how Mr. Trapp bears the burden of all these women to support. The cost of launching twin daughters into Society—mercy!”

Clara glanced over Beatrice’s fine silk morning gown and the flashing rings that were never removed but for bathing, but said nothing. Oswald Trapp couldn’t spend his wealth in this lifetime if he tried. Still, the Trapps had not had to take her in when Bentley had died.

She truly must keep that in mind. Clara tuned out the rest of her sister-in-law’s complaints as she gathered up her drawing supplies and tied shut her portfolio. There’d be no more time to work until the next morning came blissfully, quietly round again.

“… Sir Thorogood himself will be here!” Beatrice’s triumphant crow shattered Clara’s calm like a hammer on glass.

The ink bottle slipped from her suddenly numb fingers to bounce harmlessly on the carpet.

“Oh, my! You’ve ruined the rug, you careless thing!”

Clara knelt to pick up the well-corked bottle with shaking hands. “No, Bea See? Not a drop spilled.”

“Well, you’d best be glad of that, Clara Rose Tremont Simpson! That carpet is very valuable!”

It wasn’t, but Clara had no interest in arguing the point. The carpets were a sensitive subject. After the last stray cat that Clara had rescued, the house had become infested with fleas. It had taken soaking every carpet with benzene to rid them of the pests. After that, Beatrice had put her foot firmly down and Clara had brought home no more strays.

“What did you say about Sir Thorogood?”

“I declare I don’t know what you think you’re about, tossing ink around my home this way. You’d think this was your house—”

Clara sighed. “Sir Thorogood. What were you saying about Sir Thorogood?”

“What? Oh … oh, yes. When I met him at the ball last night I invited him to dine with us tomorrow. I just received his acceptance! We shall finally have an individual of wit at our table,” she caroled.

“At last,” Clara seconded weakly. She was fairly sure Beatrice didn’t spot the irony of her own statement.

“I thought you were partial to him. What’s wrong? You’ve gone pale of a sudden. Are you ill?”

Beatrice blinked at her in real concern. Clara took her sister-in-law’s hand, grateful for the reminder that Beatrice was not bad, simply more concerned with a part of life that meant nothing to Clara.

If she didn’t wish to be judged, she ought not to judge. “Dear Bea. You are so kind to me and I am so indebted.”

Beatrice actually blushed. “Well, of course you are. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. Bentley was very fond of you, and it’s only right that I should look out for you.”

Clara gripped her hand and smiled. “Well, then, you must take me shopping for a new gown. I rather think I’ll need something much prettier for our esteemed guest.”

Beatrice clapped her hands together. “We should go now so they will have time to fit you properly.”

“No, tomorrow,” Clara said absently. She had much work to do today and then there was tonight’s venture. She would shop tomorrow, she decided, then draw until the time came for dinner with the impostor.

Then Clara saw the disappointment in Beatrice’s face.

“But you must help me choose just the right gown. Perhaps something …” Clara concealed a shudder. “Pink?”

The cloudy night was perfect for a thief. Dalton leaned back onto the warm chimney at his back and watched the dusk overtake the square below him.

Wadsworth’s residence was one of a row of brick houses, all connected by their side walls. The fronts faced across the cobbles to the square with its manicured lawn and white graveled paths winding through graceful trees.

Wadsworth’s house was fine, if a bit ostentatious. It stood at a respectable address, in a part of Mayfair largely occupied by what Stubbs would call “the Quality.” Wadsworth was in manufacturing. Not all the money in the world would buy him into the
ton
, although presumably nothing could prevent him from living next door.

The back gardens ranged from the floral explosion of the house at his back to the grim formality of Wads-worth’s perfect lawn and flawless walk. Apparently not a blade dared grow out of place. Even the slates on Wadsworth’s roof were fitted with military precision.

The lamplighter came into the square below, trundling his oil cask and his apprentice, whom he sent shinnying up the posts like a monkey. All around the square the two figures went as the twilight deepened, until the center of the square glowed golden in the bluing night.

The light was enough for those at street level to see their way, but Dalton knew it didn’t reach as high as the rooftops. In his dark seaman’s wool and black silk mask, he was merely another shadow among many. On a cloudy night like tonight, not even the waxing moon would betray him.

Still, there was no point in making his entry too early. Londoners kept late hours, and Wadsworth was no exception, according to the servants. Dalton had approached
an elderly footman earlier in the day and struck up an idle conversation.

“Sorry, me lad, but ‘is lordship don’t ‘ire outside ‘elp.”

“That’s too bad. I been lookin’ for anythin’ to keep the little ones fed. I’ll shovel coal, sand, or horse apples, I ain’t choosy. Me wife’s right pretty and well spoke. She could serve sometime when ‘is lordship’s ‘avin’ a do.”

“Nay, son, you don’t want to put a pretty girl in this ‘ouse, not by far! Late hours and little to show for it, and not every guest behaves as he should.”

Dalton had pressed for details but the old fellow had only warned him off again and shuffled back indoors. That alone had been something odd, for even the most base servants tended to boast about their employers to others in service, if only to make themselves more important.

So he prepared himself for a long wait and slouched comfortably against the toasty bricks behind him. At least this resident kept his house warm. He pondered the pretty grounds behind “his” house in the very last of the dusk. A woman lived here, likely more than one.

A warm house. A pretty house. You needed a woman for that. His own rather austere mansion was very fine, the best. Built by his grandfather for his grandmother upon their wedding, it was still new enough to be sturdy, but old enough to have become a fixture in its own elegant square.

But it was neither pretty nor warm. Nor would it be soon, for Dalton had no intention of marrying for many years, if at all. He simply couldn’t imagine his life with a wife and child in it. There would be too much distraction, too much disorder.

Besides, he had a nephew to inherit someday. Collis Tremayne would make a fine Lord Etheridge in his turn, or father one of his own. Families were for another sort of man altogether, not for him.

Still, the garden below was very nice, indeed.

Clara trod as softly as she could along the carpeted hallway passing before the family bedrooms. Although it was past midnight, there was no guarantee that everyone was soundly asleep. Beatrice liked to think that they kept “town hours,” though their social calendar wasn’t quite
that
full. Privately Clara believed that if one slept until past noon, one didn’t have much choice about staying wakeful into the night.

Once she passed the tricky section of hall, she breathed much easier. The few servants that the Trapps employed were long in their beds on the third floor. As long as she was careful, they were not likely to wake for anything but a furious ringing of the call bell or their mistress’s demanding bellow.

Still, they were paid well and seemed happy enough with their service, unlike poor little Rose.

Clara checked under the cloth in the basket she carried over one arm. The beef rolls were no longer warm, unfortunately, but the crockery flask full of chocolate was still hot. And she’d managed to save a few teacakes back from the twins.

Anticipating Rose’s delight with a great deal of pleasure, Clara made her way up the final narrow set of stairs to the attic. She fished the key from her pocket and unlocked the door. As far as she knew, no one had missed this key in the year and a half that she had been making this trip, likely because no one in the sedentary Trapp household wanted to climb one more stair than was necessary.

The attic was even darker than the hall, but Clara didn’t light her candle. By now, she knew every trunk and box by heart, and could whisk her way through the long narrow attic without a single stumble.

At the far end, she stopped before a bare plank wall—all that separated her attic from that of the adjoining house. She tapped her knuckles softly on it three times, then stepped back.

Before her, one of the widest planks shifted to the side, swinging on its last remaining nail. A small hand holding the stub of a candle came through, and Clara blinked at the sudden radiance as she took the holder and set it on a nearby trunk. Rose wasn’t nearly as comfortable in the dark as she was.

Then a small head covered in a large cap emerged, and the rest of a slender young chambermaid slipped sideways through the narrow hole.

“Hello, Miss Clara!”

“Hello, Rose,” Clara replied warmly. “I’ve brought your payment. And this time, there’s lemon seed cake.”

The girl’s thin face lighted at the mention of the sweets, but she politely waited for Clara to sit down and begin spreading the contents of the basket before she sat herself.

When Clara had first met the next-door housemaid, she had been putting the last of Bentley’s things away
in the attic after his death. The sound of muffled crying had been very startling, especially as she had been shedding a tear or two of her own at the time.

At first, she thought Beatrice had come upstairs to help her after all. Then she’d realized that the quiet, secretive sobs were coming from the wrong direction, not to mention they in no way resembled Bea’s theatrical wails.

She had followed the sound to the far wall of the attic, where she had remembered that the Trapps’ house was one in a terrace of connecting houses around the rather exclusive Smythe Square.

She’d never heard a sound from the houses on either side before, but the walls between were thick stone and quite impenetrable. For some reason, this wall had been left unfinished and planked over instead.

The sound of weeping was growing more desperate, but eerily no louder. Her heart moved by the sad sound, Clara knelt beside the wall and knocked softly.

“Hello? Are you ill? Is there anything I can do for you?”

The sobs cut off immediately, and there was only silence from the other side of the wall, but somehow Clara knew that the weeper was listening. She sat down on the floor with her back to the wall, unwilling to leave someone alone in such pain.

“I’ve been crying myself,” she said to the wall, leaning her cheek against the rough wood. “I know being sad is harder when you’re by yourself.”

She heard nothing for a long moment, then came a mighty sniffle. Encouraged, Clara continued. “I’m sad because someone has passed away.”

There came another sniffle, then a small voice. “Who?”

“My husband. He is—was a soldier, fighting on the Peninsula.”

“Napoleon got ‘im?”

Clara shook her head ruefully. “No. No heroic finish for Bentley. He slipped in the mud and broke his neck on the way to the latrine.”

There was a long moment of silence. Then Clara heard a muffled snicker. It was a terrible moment to laugh, Clara knew that, but she couldn’t help a giggle of her own. Then her pent-up sense of the ridiculous took over and she laughed with the stranger on the other side of the wall until more tears tracked her cheeks.

When her helpless half-tearful giggles finally died down, Clara wiped her eyes, trying to feel bad but truthfully feeling a good bit better.

“Did you love him?”

Clara didn’t reply right away, because she truly didn’t know. “I liked him. He was a bit light-minded, and not terribly responsible, but he was kind. Perhaps if we’d had more than a few months together I would have come to love him. But he was called up soon after the wedding.”

Before
, actually, which was why she’d married him in an uncharacteristic bout of romantic and patriotic fervor.
Your typical wartime marriage
, she thought. The stuff of jest and ridicule. Poor Bentley. All the most important moments of his life had been a series of hackneyed japes.

She wiped her eyes again, then turned back to the wall. “Why were you crying?”

“Me back. It hurts.”

“Your back? Did you injure yourself?”

“No, miss. ‘Twas the whipping.”

Clara was horrified. “You were
whipped?’

“Oh, it ain’t so bad,” the little voice quavered. “Not like the time I spilt tea on the master’s guest.”

“You were whipped for spilling
tea

“Well, it were
real
hot, miss. And I’m terrible clumsy. But I never spilt tea again,” the voice went on to assure her. “This time it were for leavin’ dust on the newel post.”

Clara couldn’t bear it. Here she’d been pitying herself, thinking her life so terrible now that she was dependent on Bentley’s sister and brother-in-law. She was ashamed as she recalled her spacious new room in Beatrice Trapp’s comfortable home, where she had no duties more onerous than helping Bea watch over two quiet girls.