The Pleasure Trap (29 page)

They were still watching the May dancers when a man on horseback rode up. “Is Lord Denison here?” he cried out. “I was told Lord Denison was here.”

Ash stepped forward. “I’m Lord Denison.”

The rider quickly dismounted. “I have an express for you, my lord.”

Frowning, Ash tore open the letter the rider had given him and took it to a lantern to read. “It’s from your father,” he told Eve, quickly scanning it.

“What does it say?”

“It says that Messenger died years ago.” He handed Eve the express.

After reading it, Eve was nonplussed. “But this can’t be true. We know he is alive.”

“We got the wrong Messenger, that’s all.”

“I don’t believe it! My father has made a mistake!”

He brushed her protest aside. “Work it out for yourself. We were looking for the wrong Messenger.” To the express rider, Ash said, “Lend me your horse and you’ll be twenty pounds the richer when I bring him back.”

There was no haggling. Twenty pounds was as much as the express rider could earn in a year.

When Ash was mounted, he called out, “Jason, a word with you?”

Jason Ford detached himself from a group of young men and came quickly to Ash’s side. “What is it?” he asked, squinting up at Ash.

Leaning low over the saddle, Ash said in an undertone, “Don’t let Miss Dearing out of your sight. I’m not expecting trouble, but it pays to be cautious.”

“Where are you going?” Jason asked.

“I’ll tell you about it when I get back. Just stay close to Miss Dearing.”

Eve watched him ride off with a sinking heart.

“You’re Angelo, aren’t you?” said Ash. “It was you who arranged for those stories to be published in the
Herald.
”

Lydia Rivers stared at him with huge, fear-bright eyes. “How did you find out?” she asked hoarsely.

“You write Gothic fiction. You even claimed to be Angelo for a short time. But it was an express letter from George Dearing that I received not fifteen minutes ago that confirmed my suspicions. Your name is Lydia, the same name as Thomas Messenger’s daughter.”

He’d learned a lot more than that. Messenger, Dearing wrote, had been hanged for the murder of his wife and son in the city of York eight years before. There had been a ferocious quarrel, witnesses said, and Messenger, enraged with drink, had set his house on fire when his wife and son were asleep in their beds.

Dearing had been working in Bristol at the time and had missed the report of the crime, which had appeared in the London papers. But Martha had seen it and, for better or worse, had kept the information from him so that he would not be distressed. She wouldn’t have told him except that he was planning to travel to London to look up a few former colleagues to see what he could find out.

Great, tearing sobs shook Lydia’s shoulders and tears spilled down her cheeks. Her eyes darted to the door as though willing someone to enter and put a stop to his questions, but Mrs. Braine, the doctor’s widowed mother, was discreetly seeing to refreshments for them, and Anna was in the barn taking care of her pregnant donkey. Had Anna been present, he doubted he’d have much success in getting a confession out of Lydia. All the same, he hadn’t expected her to crumble so quickly. If he hadn’t known who she was and what she’d done, he might have felt sorry for her. Sighing, he handed her his handkerchief.

Between sobs, she got out, “It’s been such a burden not knowing what to say or do. I’m not sorry that you found me out. Yes, I’m Lydia Messenger.”

It wasn’t much of a confession, but it was a beginning. When her shoulders stopped heaving and the sobs subsided, he went on, “Antonia’s notes were never sent on from the White Hart, were they? You kept them?”

She spoke in a voice he could hardly hear. “Yes, I kept them. I didn’t think anyone would miss them. I started reading them and I didn’t want to part with them. As I grew older, I read Mrs. Dearing’s stories over and over. I thought they were wonderful. It was because of those stories that I became a writer. They inspired me, you might say.”

“What I can’t understand,” he said, “is why you published Antonia’s stories in the first place. Surely not for the money. What did you hope to gain?”

There was another bout of weeping before she answered him. “It was Robert’s idea to publish them in the
Herald.
He thought it would spark everyone’s interest in my books—you know, create awareness. Then, when I revealed that I was Angelo, the public would be wild to buy my novels.”

“Robert.” He stared at her hard. “Robert Thompson? The heckler?”

She nodded. “He wasn’t really heckling us. He was only trying to cause a stir so that the public would want to know who Angelo was.”

“And what is your connection to Robert Thompson?”

She looked up at him, then quickly looked away. “He was my lover,” she said brokenly.

Ash was mildly surprised, not that Lydia had had a lover but that she’d taken up with someone like Thompson, the landlord of a small inn.

When she stopped weeping into his handkerchief, he said gently, “And what if the
Herald
hadn’t published Antonia’s stories? What if the editor turned them down? What would you have done then?”

“Nothing. It wouldn’t have mattered. I suppose Robert would have come up with another idea to get my name known. He was like that. He was so proud of me.”

He looked at her in stunned disbelief. “Didn’t you realize that Eve might have recognized you or her mother’s stories? She could have revealed the truth. Then where would you have been?”

She shook her head. “I knew she wouldn’t recognize me. There have been other symposiums and she didn’t know who I was then. As for her claiming that the stories were Antonia’s, Robert said that that would only stir up more speculation, and that was all to the good. Eve couldn’t prove that her mother wrote the stories, because they were in my possession.”

When he swore under his breath, she went on hastily, “I didn’t
want
to be unkind to her, but if people thought we were rivals or that Eve was jealous of me, they would think that she claimed the stories were her mother’s out of spite.”

“Who chose the name Angelo?”

“Robert did. It means
Messenger.
I didn’t want anyone to know my real name, but Robert said that no one would remember my father’s crime after so many years.”

His questions were getting him nowhere, so he decided to be more direct. “Mrs. Rivers,” he said. “Lydia. Did you murder Robert Thompson?”

She gasped, and all the color drained from her face. “No! I loved Robert! I didn’t know someone had murdered him until I read about it in the newspaper. Can you imagine how I felt? I was waiting for him to write to me or come to me, and all the time he was cold in his grave. I had no one to talk to, no one who could find anything out for me. He was a married man with children, and I had no claim to know anything.”

He watched her bent head as her shoulders began to heave again. Now he understood why she had gone into a decline. It wasn’t the stab wound that had brought her so low or the fact that her sister hadn’t come for her. There was no sister, and he doubted that there was anyone waiting for her in Warwick. It was grief for the man she loved.

“If you didn’t kill Thompson,” he said, “then who did?”

Another theory was beginning to form, but this time he wanted to make quite sure of his facts.

She blew her nose and dabbed at her eyes. “I don’t know. The newspapers said that he was waylaid by footpads.” She looked up at him. “He had no enemies as far as I knew, or none that he told me about.”

He nodded and gentled his tone. “I think you know, though, who stabbed you.”

She shook her head vigorously. “It was dark. I didn’t see his face.”

“But you said it was Angelo.”

“It was what everyone expected me to say, so I took the easy way out.”

He said, suddenly abrupt, “There was no note for you in your glove. You were meeting Thompson, weren’t you? So what happened, Lydia? Tell me.”

She exhaled a long sigh and stared at the hot coals in the grate. “I was so happy that night. I met Robert at Vauxhall and we arranged to meet later, after everyone at the Manor had gone to bed. That’s all we had, stolen hours here and there. Robert would never have left his wife and children, and I wouldn’t have asked him to.” She stirred and looked up at him. “We were supposed to meet close to the gates of the grounds. I waited a long time, but Robert didn’t appear. I was making my way back to the house when I was attacked.”

If she was an actress, she was very convincing. But there was something that only she could answer. “Tell me about your brother,” he said abruptly.

“M-my brother?” She seemed confused by the turn in the conversation.

“Your brother, Albert Messenger. He died in the fire with your mother, and your father hanged for their murder.”

She winced and looked at him with the eyes of a pet dog that had just been kicked by its master. “My father always protested his innocence.”

“Where were you when your house burned down?”

Now she was appalled. “You can’t think I had anything to do with it!”

“I don’t. I’m just curious.”

“I’d left home by then. My father’s drinking, the constant quarreling—I couldn’t wait to get away. So I took a position as companion to Mrs. Northcote in Bath.” She added bitterly, “But when it came out that I was a murderer’s daughter, I was let go. After that, I changed my name. And that’s when I became a writer.”

“What about your brother? Was he in school? Where was he when your father was working away from home?”

She looked puzzled. “He was at school during term time, but in the holidays he would join my father wherever he was working. My mother…” She sighed. “My mother couldn’t manage Bertie. My father was the only person he would listen to. Why do you ask?”

He was trying to place Albert Messenger at the scene of the crimes. It was possible, but he’d only been a boy then. Possible, but not something he wanted to believe.

He let a heartbeat of silence go by, then asked gently, “Was it Bertie who murdered those people in Mrs.Dearing’s stories? Was it, perhaps, your father? Or was it you, Lydia?”

Her jaw trembled. Shaking her head, she said, “Those were only stories. They weren’t true.”

“Weren’t they? Tell me about the fire. Who identified the bodies of your mother and your brother?”

“My father. But they couldn’t be identified, not conclusively. They were burned beyond recognition. Lord Denison, were those stories true?”

“I believe so.”

“But they were accidents, tragic accidents. I would never have allowed them to be published if I’d thought they were murders.”

Hands loosely clasped, Ash leaned forward in his chair. The last thing he wanted was to frighten her into silence, but they were at a critical point. He didn’t have a choice. He had to push her.

“Here’s how I see it, Lydia. When you published those stories, the person who murdered three innocent people got the shock of his life. He’d thought he’d got away with murder, but someone was reviving an interest in his old crimes. He’d want to silence that person before it was too late. You practically invited him to the symposium when you advertised the time and place. So he goes to the symposium and what does he find? Lydia Rivers, one of the Gothic writers, is hinting that she is Angelo. That’s why he tried to kill you. Are you with me so far?”

She nodded mutely.

“Robert Thompson wasn’t as lucky as you. I think our murderer discovered that Mr. Thompson arranged the sale of the stories to the
Herald,
so he had to die, too. I think you know or you have guessed who that person is. You never go out alone. You’re practically in hiding. Who is he, Lydia? Who is he?”

She let out a low cry and seemed to collapse into herself. “It’s Bertie. He didn’t die in the fire. The man who died was his friend. Bertie said that he lost his memory when a beam fell on him. He didn’t know he was Albert Messenger until recently. I wanted to believe him. He is my brother, but he frightens me. He has always frightened me.”

“He must have taken another name?”

Her voice broke. “Jason Ford. I didn’t know he was alive until the night of the symposium.”