Louise Allen Historical Collection (69 page)

Lina edged around to the far side of the chair. Her heart was thumping, her mouth was dry. Perhaps Aunt Clara’s illness was contagious after all. She must be in a fever, dreaming this. ‘You…you would auction me off to the highest bidder?’

‘Oh, no, not an auction. I have an offer for you already from Sir Humphrey Tolhurst.’

‘The magistrate?’ But Sir Humphrey was fifty if he was a day. And pompous and only came to play cards and ogle the posture girls. She had seen him from the screened gallery that her aunt used to watch the activities in the salon.

‘That’s the man. I pointed you out to him in the street and he was very taken with you. He would not want to be involved in anything like an auction, of course; he values his privacy too much for that. I was able to set a very good price in consideration of that accommodation.’ Makepeace chuckled. ‘A very good price indeed.’

‘And then what?’ Lina asked, surprised to hear herself sounding defiant. She had never before turned and faced danger, or her father’s bullying anger. She had always been the timorous sister, the nervous one who ran if she could not hide. But it seemed that, if pushed to extremes, she could try to fight.

‘You can only sell my virginity once.’ Legitimately, that was. The girls had told her all about the ways to feign a maidenhead, as they had so much else that should have shocked her to the core. But their open, cheerful acceptance of the commerce between men and women, in all its weird and puzzling manifestations, had left her much wiser—in theory—and reluctant to judge them.

‘True,’ he said. ‘But it will give me a tidy sum to invest in the equipment this establishment is lacking. Flagellation is all the rage.’

‘Mother Moll’s is the specialist in that,’ Lina retorted, parroting the girls’ gossip. ‘There is too much competition for another flogging school so close.’

‘Oh, no. Not for the
gentlemen
who require chastising. This would be for those who wish to administer the punishment.’

‘But the girls—’

‘Will do as they are told or be out in the gutter.’

Lina clenched her teeth to stop them chattering. One of them, Katy, had shown her the scars she had received after a vicious flogging at another brothel. She had been imprisoned there until she’d managed to escape by climbing down the drainpipe.

‘I will leave,’ she said, trying her best to sound confident. ‘I will go back to my father.’

‘To the vicarage?’ he enquired, startling her with his knowledge. ‘Oh, yes, I made it my business to find out all about you, Miss Celina. Both your sisters are gone now—did you know that? And your doting papa has struck your name from the family Bible and denies he ever had daughters, so my man tells me.’

Bella gone? But where?
She had soon realised that her letters home were being destroyed, just as her father must have destroyed those from her sister Meg after she eloped. But she had always thought that Bella was safe at home. Sensible Bella, housekeeping for their tyrant of a father… Please God that wherever she was, she was safe and happy as Meg must be with James, the young officer she had run away with six years before.

She realised Makepeace was still speaking. ‘You’ll do as you’re told, my girl, or your ailing auntie loses this house and her precious girls start earning their living like the common whores that they are.’

‘When?’ Lina whispered. There was the sound of doors slamming all around her, but they were in her head. If she had only herself to worry about she would run, even though she had nowhere to go. Anything, even going back to Suffolk and begging forgiveness on her knees, would be better than this. But that would leave Aunt Clara and the girls at the mercy of this scheming reptile. She could see no way out, none at all.

‘Tomorrow. They will send a carriage at seven in the evening. And you be nice to Sir Humphrey or I know who will be the first one to try out the new flogging horse’

Lina edged towards the door, unwilling to turn her back on him. The handle turned and she was out. But not alone. A big bruiser, a man she had never seen before, stood in front of her aunt’s door.

Lina turned and walked away on unsteady legs to the room shared by Katy and Miriam. They were sprawled on the bed, laughing and playing with Miriam’s collection of paste jewellery. As Lina walked in they looked up, their smiles of welcome freezing as they saw her face.

‘What is it, Lina love?’ Katy slid off the bed, her dyed red curls bouncing.

‘Mr Makepeace has sold me to Sir Humphrey Tolhurst.’ Lina heard her own voice, so flat and expressionless that she could hardly recognise it. She swallowed hard. If she gave way now she would collapse into hysterics, she was sure. ‘Tell me what to do so it will be over quickly. Please, tell me.’

Dreycott Park, the north Norfolk coast—April 24th, 1815

‘H
e’s coming!’ Johnny, the boot boy, came tumbling through the front door, shirt half-untucked, red in the face with running from his post in the gazebo on top of Flagstaff Hill. He had been up there every day since the message had arrived that the late Lord Dreycott’s heir was on his way from London.

Lina gave up all pretence of sewing and came out into the hall. Trimble the butler was snapping his fingers, sending footmen scurrying to assemble the rest of the staff.

She had not been able to settle to anything in the four days since Lord Dreycott’s funeral. When she had fled from Sir Humphrey Tolhurst’s house, terrified, desperate and wanted by the law, her aunt had sent her to an old friend’s rural retreat—to safety, so Clara had believed. But now her elderly protector was gone.

Lina smoothed down the skirts of her black afternoon dress and tried for composure. This was the end of her sanctuary, a brief seven weeks since she had fled from London, a price on her head for a theft she had not committed. The heir was coming to claim what was his and, no doubt, to eject hangers-on from his new house—and then what would become of her?

‘Where are the carriages? How many?’ the butler demanded.

‘No carriages, Mr Trimble, sir. Just two riders and a pack horse. I saw them coming through the Cromer road gate. They’re walking, sir, the animals looked tired. They’ll be a while yet.’

‘Even so, hurry.’

Hurry. Pack, take this money and hurry.
The elegant square entrance hall blurred and faded and became a bedchamber. Aunt Clara, white-lipped, her face drawn after a week of racking sickness, dragged herself up against the pillows as Lina sobbed out her story.

‘He did not touch you?’ she had whispered urgently and they both glanced at the door. Makepeace’s bully boy might be back at any moment. I swear Makepeace will suffer for this.’

‘No. Tolhurst did not touch me.’ The relief of that was still overwhelming, the only good thing in the entire nightmare. ‘He made me undress while he watched. Then he took his clothes off.’ It took a moment to push her mind past the image of indulged middle-aged flab, mottled skin, the terrifying
thing
that thrust out from below the swell of Tolhurst’s belly. ‘And he began to reach for me… And then he gasped, and his eyes bulged and his face went red and he fell down. So I rang for help and pulled on my clothes and—’

‘He was dead? You are certain?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Lina hadn’t been able to bring herself to touch him, but she could tell. The bulging blue eyes had seemed fixed on her, still avid with lust even as they began to glaze over. She had stared in horror as her fingers fumbled with ribbons and garters. ‘They all came in then—the valet, the butler, the younger son, Reginald Tolhurst. Mr Tolhurst knelt down and tried to find a pulse—then he sent the valet for the doctor and told the butler to lock me in the library. He said his father’s sapphire ring was missing.’

‘The Tolhurst Sapphire? My God.’ Her aunt had stared at her. ‘Wasn’t he wearing it when you—?’

‘I don’t know!’ Lina’s voice quavered upwards and she caught her herself before it became a shriek. ‘I wasn’t looking at his rings.

‘I heard them talking outside. They said the ring was not in the room, not in the safe nor the jewel box. The butler said Sir Humphrey had been wearing it when I arrived. Mr Tolhurst sent a footman to Bow Street, to the magistrates.’ She was gabbling with anxiety, but she could not seem to steady herself.

‘He said I would be taken up for theft, that I must have thrown it out of the window to an accomplice. He said I would hang like the thieving whore I was.’ She closed her eyes and fought for calm. Her aunt was ill, she must remember that. But she had nowhere else to go, no one else to help her. ‘I climbed out of the library window and ran,’ she finished. ‘I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘You must go out of London until the truth can be discovered,’ Clara said with decision, suddenly sounding more like her old self. ‘I’ll send you to Simon Ashley—Lord Dreycott—in Norfolk, he will take you in.’

‘If I go to the magistrates with a lawyer,’ Lina said, ‘they’ll believe me then, surely? If I run away—’

‘You live in a brothel. No one will believe you are innocent, and once they have you, there will be no attempt to establish the truth,’ her aunt said with all the bitterness bred of years of dealings with the law. ‘The Tolhurst Sapphire is famous and worth thousands. Did you read about that maidservant who was hanged a fortnight ago for stealing a silver teaspoon? It was found a few days after the execution where her mistress had lost it—down the side of the sofa. If they didn’t believe her, a girl with a good character, they are not going to believe you. Help me get up.’

‘But, Aunt—’

‘Hurry, Lina.’ Clara threw back the bedclothes and walked unsteadily to her desk. ‘Put on your plain bombazine walking dress. Pack what you need in bags you can carry.
Hurry
.’

‘There is no time to lose,’ Trimble urged.

Lina blinked. This was the present and she had to focus on the present danger, not the past. The staff lined up, tugged cuffs and aprons under the butler’s critical eye. Mrs Bishop, the cook, headed the row of maids; the footmen and the boot boy aligned themselves on the other side next to Trimble. It was not a large indoor staff—ten in all—but a reclusive and eccentric ninety-year-old baron had needed no more. Where should she, the cuckoo in the nest, stand?

‘Miss Haddon?’ Trimble gestured her to the front. It was uncomfortable using a false name, but her real one was too dangerous. Makepeace had considered that Celina Shelley sounded suitable for a courtesan, so the law had known her real name from the beginning.

Trimble seemed tense. Lina smiled at him in an effort to reassure both of them. In the days since her improbable protector had slipped away in his sleep, eased on his last journey by copious glasses of best cognac, an injudicious indulgence in lobster and too many cheroots, the staff had looked to her as the temporary head of the household.

She was, they accepted, Lord Dreycott’s house guest, a distant acquaintance in need of a roof over her head because of the indisposition of an aunt. Her eyes filled with tears at the memory of his kindness, masked behind a pretence of cantankerous bad humour. He had read Aunt Clara’s scribbled note, asked a few sharp questions, then rang for Trimble and informed him that Miss Haddon was staying for the foreseeable future.

Lord Dreycott had waved her out of his crowded, book-strewn library with an impatient gesture, but she had seen how his other hand caressed the note, the twisted, brown-spotted fingers gentle on the thick paper. He was doing this for Clara, for some memory of a past relationship, she realised, and Lina had not taken any notice of his gruffness after that.

Now she took her place and waited, her face schooled into a calm expressionless mask as she had learned to do for years in the face of Papa’s furies over some minor sin or another. Her fingers trembled slightly, making a tiny rustling noise against the crisp black silk, and she pressed the tips together to still them. Somehow she had to persuade this man to let her stay here without telling him why.

At last, the sound of hooves on the carriage drive. Paul, the second footman, swayed back on his heels to keep an unobtrusive watch out of the narrow slit of glass beside the front door then, as the sound of male voices penetrated the thick panels, he swung it open with a flourish. The new Lord Dreycott had arrived.

‘My lord.’ Trimble stepped through on to the arcaded entrance and bowed. ‘Welcome to Dreycott Park.’

Staring past the butler’s narrow shoulders, Lina could see only glimpses of the horses—a curving dappled grey rump and a long white tail, the arch of a black neck, the bulk of oilskin-wrapped cases piled on a pack saddle. Then the grey shifted and she saw its rider fleetingly. A dust-coloured coat draped over the horse’s rump; long soft boots without spurs sagged softly at the ankles; hair the colour of polished mahogany showed over-long beneath a wide-brimmed hat. He swung down out of the saddle and, even with the narrow view between butler and pillar, she saw the ease and suppleness of a fit man.