Death and the Cyprian Society Read online

“I shall try. Will you come back in time to sit with me?”

  “Probably not, dearest.”

  “But I shall be lonely!”

  “No, you won’t. You will be sleeping. And if you are better by this evening, I shall read to you.”

  “Oh! Shall you? What from?” cried Eddie.

  “A new collection of old German stories that I think you will like—they’re full of witches and wolves. In one of them, a lady is popped naked into a barrel with nails driven through it, and dragged along the street by horses till she dies.”

  “Is she a bad lady, then?”

  “Yes; a terrible, wicked lady!”

  “Oh,” said Eddie. “I like it better when such things happen to good ladies.”

  Arabella was shocked. “Why ever do you say that?”

  “Because when awful things happen to the wicked, we cannot help but feel glad, and it is not right to take joy in the suffering of others. But when mishaps befall the virtuous, we get to feel sorry for them. Sympathy is a lovely virtue, and it gives us an excuse to cry. You must admit that it feels good to cry sometimes.”

  Arabella looked at her niece with doubtful regard: Was the girl turning into a Catholic? It was possible. Though barely eleven, she frequently came out with mature pronouncements and shrewd observations, and Edwardina behaved more like a wife toward Frank than her mother ever had: mending his stockings, boiling his eggs, and seeing that he wrapped up warmly before going out in the cold. Now that Sarah Jane had left, it would not surprise Arabella very much if the pair were to marry when the girl came of age. But there was very little that would surprise her, insofar as Eddie was concerned. The child might grow up to be a saint, or a scientist, or the Northwest Passage’s discoverer. And, if she did decide to become a Catholic, she might conceivably become the second female pope.

  “I thought I heard a gentleman’s voice just before you came in,” Eddie said.

  “Yes, I expect it was Glendeen.”

  “Had he come to see me?”

  “Why . . . no, dear. You’ve never met the duke, have you?”

  “No,” she replied drowsily. “But I thought he might have come to see me, all the same.”

  “You old silly!” said Arabella affectionately. “Why should a complete stranger come here especially to see you?”

  “From curiosity,” said Eddie. “Because I am your niece, and I am a virgin. Soon I shall be old enough to do what you do.” She sighed and smiled. “I should think they will be coming to see me, you know,” she said, “sooner or later.”

  Well, perhaps Eddie would not be ascending to heaven after all. But the idea that Arabella’s admirers might start coming to her house in order to visit her niece was not an agreeable one. The old making way for the new was one of Arabella’s least favorite themes, especially where it concerned her personally, and particularly especially when she herself was relegated to the role of “the old.”

  She opened the drawer in the bedside table and removed Frank’s little black bottle. Eddie watched her pull the stopper and sniff the contents.

  “Faugh!” cried Arabella. “How say you, niece? Do you feel restored after taking this?”

  The child shook her head feebly but emphatically on the pillow.

  “I thought not,” said Arabella. “Let’s leave it up to Mrs. Moly to bring you round with nourishing food. I always prefer meals to medicines, don’t you? Besides,” she said as she emptied the bottle’s contents into the bedpan, “pot liquor and beef tea are much better restoratives than mercury.”

  “But Frank and the doctor want me to take it,” whispered Eddie.

  “They want you to get well,” said Arabella. “And I rather think, my dear, that the proof is in the pudding.”

  Chapter 5

  The din was unbearable. Plasterers, carpenters, and pipe fitters overran the place, all sawing away, hammering, shouting, and dropping things from heights. Only the Cyprian Society’s tiny reception room, located just inside the front door and designed for a single occupant, was sufficiently removed from the chaos to allow for anything approaching normal conversation. But it was not very comfortable. The yellow chamber was intended as a holding area, where outsiders (preferably one at a time) were kept until they could be properly vetted and/or met by the member they had come to see. It wasn’t really large enough for two persons, but the alternative was unacceptable: Arabella was not about to entertain Charles’s disreputable friends at her house.

  Owing to Glendeen’s unexpected visit and the prolonged leave she had subsequently taken of Eddie, Arabella arrived late to find that her first witness had disappeared. The idea of a drunken sot wandering around loose did not sit well. Mr. Tilbury was supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening. But the porter had been obliged to vacate his booth in order to rescue a plasterer who’d slipped from a scaffold. The poor fellow had been dangling by one arm, high above the floor, and the porter had gone to fetch one of the state tablecloths, which he instructed the others to use as a net. In the meantime, “Snoodles” had escaped.

  The plasterer’s dilemma had been concluded without injuries; Arabella forgave Mr. Tilbury for leaving his post, and commended him upon his quick thinking. But by the time she found Penderel Skeen, he was fairly well snockered on club wine.

  Arabella guided him back to the little waiting room, whilst Mr. Tilbury went off to arrange for a pot of black coffee. She did not expect to get much helpful information from this fellow, but she had to try, for her leads were few.

  “Mr. Skeen,” said she, “can you tell me, please, about your activities on the night you went with your friends to spy upon a pair of lovers?”

  She opened the pale pink notebook she had brought with her and took a short pencil from behind her ear, wetting the tip of it with her tongue.

  “Call me ‘Snoodles,’ ” he said. “Ev’ryone does.”

  “I’d rather not, if you don’t mind. What can you tell me about that night?”

  “When?”

  “When you watched a couple having sex in a back room.”

  “Wasn’t night. Sun was still up. ’S late afternoon.”

  “Yes?” said Arabella, making a note. “What else do you remember?”

  “Charley wanned t’ go t’ Drury Lane. Tha’s where the girls are, ’f you ever wanna girl, which I don’ expect you ever do. Charley did, though, an’ he’s frens with the chap who runs one o’ the muffin shops there. There’s . . . there’s a song about it; how does it go . . . ?” he trailed off, and his narrative came to a halt.

  “Do get on with it!” said Arabella impatiently.

  “Sorry. Well, it sounded like a fine idea to the res’ of us.

  We thought, you know, we’d get some hot ‘muffins,’ fresh from this fellow’s ‘bakery.’ But then we lost our way . . . that tune. You know the one I mean. We sang it as we were . . . were going along . . .”

  And to Arabella’s annoyance, he began to sing:

  Oh, do you know the muffin man,

  the muffin man, the muffin man.

  Oh, do you know the muffin man

  who lives in Drury Lane?

  “That one.”

  The coffeepot arrived, and Arabella poured a cup for her witless witness, just as he was starting on the next verse:

  “Oh, yes I know the muffin man, the muffin man, the—”

  “But that’s not where you went,” she said, cutting him off.

  “No. Wouldn’ have done us any good. B’cause we were too inc . . . incap . . . incupabble. Y’know . . . y’ gotta be able to get it up, I mean . . . ”

  “I know,” said Arabella.

  “It was Arsy-Varsey’s,” he said suddenly, and gulped down the contents of his cup in a single swig. Then he spluttered an obscenity and grabbed his throat as the coffee scalded his trachea.

  “What was Arsy-Varsey’s?” asked Arabella, giving him a moment to recover.

  “The idea. Arsy thought of it first. B’cause he knew where it was. An’ he was taking
us there when Charley decided we should go to Drury Lane instead.... ‘Then, both of us know the muffin man, the muff—’”

  “That’s enough singing, if you don’t mind.”

  Snoodles shook his head, as if to clear it, and regarded his coffee cup with dislike. “You know, I don’t much care for this wine,” he said in an undertone. “The other vintage was much better. Let’s have some more of that one.”

  “Not just now,” said Arabella, scribbling fiercely in her notebook. “You were saying that Mr. Savory-Pratt originally planned to take you to the live performance, but Charley wanted to go to Drury Lane?”

  “Yeah. But Drury Lane wasn’ open. Too early, y’see. An’ besides, we were too drunk to . . . to be able to . . .”

  “Yes. So Mr. Savory-Pratt took you to the other place, like he’d originally planned. Do you remember where it was that he took you?”

  Snoodles frowned with the strain of remembering. “Shop of some kind. We went in through the rear. Ha! ‘Went in through the rear!’ Mus’ remember to tell that one to Bumpy!”

  “Do you recall what street you were in, Mr. Skeen?”

  “No. I jus’ followed the other chaps. In fact, I brought up the rear! Haw!”

  Arabella noted with relief that despite the man’s frequent, idiotic asides, he was beginning to show signs of sobering up.

  “All right,” she said. “And then what happened?”

  “Well, this bloke met us at the door, an’ took us upstairs.”

  She straightened. “What sort of bloke? Do you remember what he looked like? Did you catch his name?”

  “No idea. Shortish. Darkish. Thick-settish.”

  “Did he have any scars? An unusual nose, perhaps, or a glass eye?”

  “Hmm,” said Snoodles, considering. “A ring in his ear. I think. With an odd-colored stone like your notebook: all sort-of pinkish. I took rather a fancy to it, and offered to give him my sister in exchange, but he wasn’t having any of that.”

  “A pink earring,” said Arabella, and she jotted down: “pink sapphire?” and “pink quartz?” “Good!” she said. “Did you notice anything else?”

  “No. It wasn’t him I’d come to look at, if you know what I mean. He took us into a room and shewed us the peepholes we were to use. They were all at about eye level for us, but when we looked through ’em, they were actchully up near the ceiling of the other room, the one on the other side of the wall, so that we were looking down at the couple on the bed. It wasn’t really all that easy to see ’em, though, because we were looking through the wall covering.”

  “Through the wallpaper?”

  “Not paper; Hessian cloth, I think.”

  “And whom did you pay?”

  “Bumpy paid. Because Charley an’ me were skinned, as usual.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Skeen,” said Arabella, rising and dismissing him with a curt nod. She almost said, “You’ve been very helpful,” out of habit, but she didn’t.

  “Bumpy” was the selfsame George Soane whom Arabella had ordered from her house on the night that Charles had disagreed so violently with the escargot. She’d had good cause for her inhospitality, as he had come out to Lustings once with her brother when Arabella was away and, sometime during the ensuing rout, had vomited into Belinda’s work basket. Afterward, Bumpy claimed to have no memory of the incident, which in his opinion should have made everything all right again, and he could not understand why Arabella should go on holding a grudge against him for so long. It had been nearly three weeks ago, now.

  Although the day had turned chilly, Arabella insisted on meeting Bumpy out of doors, as he was known to possess “the most appalling-bad cleanliness habits,” and having just insulted her ears with Penderel Skeen’s brainless “muffin” refrain, she was loathe to do as badly by her nose.

  Readers will recall that the Cyprian Society was going to have one front door facing St. James’s Place, and another facing Little St. James’s Place. Ergo, there could be no rear garden, because no “rear” existed. There was, however, a small strip of land at the side, which intervened between the former hotel and the building next door to it, and here Arabella had commissioned a garden feature, formed on one she had admired in Italy. A rectangle of velvety green lawn was planted down the length of its two longer sides in golden poplar trees, and a marble bench, placed at one of the rectangle’s short ends, faced a marble fountain at the other. Quiet, pretty, and private, this “meditation grove” afforded the perfect spot for quizzing a witness with a foxy reek.

  Arabella had never before had occasion to observe Bumpy in daylight, where his fiery hair, dead-white skin, and scarlet pimples (the famous “bumps” for which he was named, and the sort often referred to as “grog blossoms”) made an arresting impression. But at least this witness was sober.

  “All I can tell you,” said Bumpy, “is that we went to the back door of a shop in Jermyn Street and then climbed up some stairs.”

  “Jermyn Street?” asked Arabella. “Are you certain?”

  “Quite certain.”

  “Do you remember what type of business it was? What did they sell?”

  “No idea. And as I never saw the front of the place, I wouldn’t be able to take you back there, or say for certain which shop it was.”

  “Jermyn Street,” said Arabella to herself. “Well, that’s something to go on, anyway. Who took you upstairs? Was it anyone you knew?”

  “Chap called Tyke. Jerry Tyke.”

  Arabella’s heart beat faster. “Can you describe him?”

  “Rum customer. Short, dark, no neck.”

  “Was there a ring in his ear?”

  “I think so. Yes. Well, there would be, wouldn’t there?”

  “Snoodles told me you paid for the entertainment. Is that whom you paid? This Mr. Tyke person?”

  “No; I paid half to Arsy-Varsey up front, and then Arsy took care of it. The tickets weren’t cheap, you know, which is more than I can say for the mort!”

  Arabella bridled. “The woman, do you mean? What about her partner? Wouldn’t you say that he was cheap, too?”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because a man doesn’t mind what he does, or who sees him when he does it. He is always true to his instincts, like the noble savage that he is. A woman, on the other hand, is wrapped to the eyes in pretense and propriety. Everything must always appear proper on the surface; no one must know what she is getting up to behind that closed door. Do you see? It is always the woman who sets the tone in society matters, because she is the one who cares to. So, if she lets her end down, the fault is hers, not his.”

  “That’s very neat!”

  “Well, so it should be! Women are the ones who regulate sex, and insist on only having it at certain times with certain restrictions. Men would love to have more freedom with regard to these matters, but women won’t let ’em. That is why, when a woman breaks the rules, she’s cheap, because they’re her rules, you see. That is also the reason we cheer on the man when he does the same thing. Because it isn’t his code he’s breaking, but that of the oppressor.”

  Arabella blinked. An outrageous line of cant, perhaps, but one that represented an entirely new approach to an old resentment. She would have to think about this later. Bumpy may have been unattractive, but he had a first-class reasoning machine behind his revolting visage.

  He gets his wit from his sire, Arabella thought. Aloud, she asked, “How was this particular woman cheap, though? Since she had no idea she was being observed?”

  “Come on!” said Soane. “She was doing Lady Ribbonhat’s footman, behind the back of the man who cossets and adores her! Besides, she knew we were up there!”

  “No, she didn’t!”

  “I beg to differ, Miss Beaumont. Why else would a woman agree to a tryst in the back of a shop? She didn’t just ‘happen’ to find herself in a strange storage room outfitted with a bed. That footman didn’t just bumble in, thinking he was entering a taproom. And I
’ll lay you even money that the pair hadn’t clapped eyes upon each other for the first time the instant we arrived. They went there on purpose for the sake of a tryst. It was all pre-arranged. Arsy was told what time we had to be there.”

  “Perhaps,” said Arabella. “But that does not mean that some unscrupulous character didn’t find out about the time of the tryst and then tell you, for his own profit.”

  “What about the eyeholes, then? Besides, we purchased tickets.”

  He had mentioned this before, but it hadn’t registered until now.

  “Tickets?” she cried.

  “With a list of dates and times printed along the bottom. Your friend was not only familiar with the setup; she was getting paid from the takings!”

  “But how do you know that?”

  “Because as we were leaving, I saw Jerry Tyke headed downstairs with an envelope that had her name on it.”

  “You knew her name?” Arabella asked.

  “Charley recognized her. Said she was a friend of yours called ‘Constance.’ The name on the envelope was ‘Costanze,’ though. Must be her stage name.”

  “Well! You were certainly very observant!”

  “I have to be. I’m a newspaperman.”

  Arabella had forgotten that. Soane was not only a journalist, he was the kind that specialized in digging up dirt and spreading scandal under the guise of “telling the truth.” Of course! It all made sense, now!

  “And how much are you charging Constance to keep this out of your newspaper?” she asked. But Soane shook his head.

  “Pigeon Pollard’s a friend of mine. He’ll find out what his piece is up to soon enough without my help. I may be a rotter, Miss Beaumont, and I own I occasionally get caught up in some pretty rum shenanigans, but I wouldn’t stoop to blackmail, and when a friend or an innocent party stands to lose by the information I’ve collected, I do not feel compelled to spill my guts.”

  “As to that, sir,” said Arabella, grimly thinking on Belinda’s little work basket, “I’m afraid I have seen and smelt evidence to the contrary!”

  The last witness, Arsy-Varsey, otherwise known as the Hon. Cuthbert St. Eustace Savory-Pratt, had not replied to her letter, and when Arabella called at his lodgings, no one seemed to know where he’d gone. Apparently, he owed people money. A couple of bailiffs skulking outside told her they’d been watching his place for over a week, but had seen no sign of the occupant.