Vice and Virtue (16 page)

She tried not to panic. It must be someone known to Mr Marshall. But the door handle rattled, then a deafening knocking began. “I demand that you open this door!” The voice belonged to Joe Deede.

Aurora’s heart thudded. Joe was still knocking on the door. When she did not answer, he began to kick it. It creaked and strained under his assault. It was an old door with an ordinary iron latch and lock. If Aurora did not open it, it would soon succumb.

She heard an inarticulate shout and the sound of scuffling feet. She backed away from the door just before it banged against the wall and Joe crashed into the room. He staggered against the table, uttered an oath, grasped the back of a chair and regarded Aurora furiously. His breath came hoarsely. “So this is how
Miss Drayton
repays our hospitality, is it?”

Aurora’s body tingled with shock. She hardly recognized Joe’s features, distorted as they were with indignation and rage. His face was flushed with exertion, his eyes pink-rimmed. But she tried to preserve her wits and think. It was no use trying to keep up her pretence; Miss Drayton’s consumptive brother who never went out was clearly absent. But it would not do to confess everything either, at least until she was certain how much Joe knew, and how he had found it out.

She kept her expression passive, though beneath her nightgown her heart was galloping. “And is this,” she asked calmly, “how a gentleman pays a call on a lady, breaking down her door in the middle of the night, when she is not dressed?” She had left the inner door open and began to make her way towards her room. “I beg you, give me leave to make myself presentable.”

“Do not walk away from me!” he roared.

Aurora stopped, but she regarded him with disdain and gestured to a chair. “Please sit down.”

“I will not sit down,” he said petulantly. “I insist that you tell me who you really are, and what your business is with Edward Francis!”

Fear gripped her. Edward’s suspicions had been well founded. After she had left Mill Street on Friday, Joe must have found the skeleton key in the lock of the cabinet, wondered what it was and alerted his father. Discovering that the letter was gone, Josiah must have left the key there to trap her, knowing she would remove it when she returned to the house on Saturday evening. As, of course, she did. Evidently, Josiah had told his son she was an impostor. But had he told Joe about the contents of the letter?

“I am Aurora Drayton,” she said blankly, “as well you know.”

He crossed the room swiftly and seized her left arm. “Do not deny that you live here with Edward Francis! Edward Drayton does not exist, and whoever you are, you are not Aurora Drayton!”

Aurora’s mind raced. Josiah’s henchmen must have been following her since the discovery of the key. Edward and Richard’s late departure from Spring Gardens made it easy for the villains to follow them, attack Richard and leave the threatening note. Earlier, Josiah’s men had seen her return to the lodgings alone, and this morning they had watched Edward leave for the Black Swan, and not yet return.

Evidently, if they had reported this to Josiah, he had then reported it to his son. Joe Deede had chosen very carefully the moment to make his assault.

He shook her arm, his grip tightening. “If you will not confess it, then be in no doubt that I will beat it out of you!”

A boorish bully, accustomed to violence. So Henry Francis had been correct about Joe Deede after all.

“I am not afraid of you,” she told him. She tried to keep her voice steady, but a constriction in her chest prevented her from drawing sufficient breath. The house was silent. She wondered whether Mary had gone to tell Mr Marshall of the angry young visitor. With his gouty foot, Mr Marshall could not climb the attic stairs, and William would be long gone at this hour.

“Indeed? Alas, you should be!” His face, a mask of frustration, was very close to Aurora’s. His breath smelled sourly of gin. “And you
will
tell me what his intention is, if you wish to preserve your beauty.”

This was such a cowardly threat that Aurora’s fear became scorn. “Only a man who is not a man will threaten a woman,” she said coldly. “I pray you, leave me be.”

His eyes hardened, and he began to twist her arm. Pain shot through her elbow. She gasped, but locked her jaw, refusing to scream. Her teeth ground against one another as he pushed her arm behind her back and applied such pressure to it she thought it must burst from its socket. All the while, he demanded that she tell him what Edward Francis had instructed her to do. “He wants to ruin my father, does he not? He thinks my father has stolen his inheritance.” He twisted her arm higher. “Though he has not, has he? Tell me you know he has not!”

Aurora’s determination not to show her pain was making her faint. Silver motes floated before her eyes. But her arm felt on the point of breaking, and to her shame, she blurted, “He has not!”

The pressure on her arm did not diminish. “Henry Francis was a blackmailer, was he not? Say it!”

“Henry Francis was…”

She could speak no more. Unconsciously, she had begun to cry. It was not the sustained weeping she remembered from her father’s funeral, or the girlish tears a quarrel with Flora would produce. It was an anguished, shuddering, sobbing onslaught that soaked her face and burned her lungs. “Please, please…” came out in a whisper. She had no breath. She closed her eyes.

And then she heard a voice that was not Joe Deede’s. “Leave hold of her, or I will have your head off!”

Her tormentor loosened, but did not relinquish, his grip. Aurora blinked frantically, trying to clear her vision. Edward stood in the doorway, his sword drawn, his eyes like gemstones in the pale mask of his face.

“Leave her be, I say, and conduct yourself like a man!” he taunted.

Aurora found herself released. She sank to the floor. Her tears were subsiding, but she was not yet mistress of herself, and trembled as if possessed by a fever.

Joe had not drawn his own sword, but when he spoke to Edward his voice was hostile and impatient. “Miss Drayton, as she calls herself, is a thief.”

Aurora’s eyes were closed, but she heard the squeak of a loose floorboard as Edward crossed the room to kneel beside her. She felt the touch of his hand upon her cheek. “Where are you hurt?” he asked.

“My arm, my shoulder.” She opened her eyes. Though her sight was tear-washed, she could see the depth of Edward’s rage. His face was pinched, and whiter than plaster.

He stood up and re-sheathed his sword. “I insist you leave my chambers immediately,” he told Joe Deede. “This lady must be attended to.”

“This
lady
, if that is what she is” – Aurora heard the thump of Joe’s fist on the table – “has been employed for a sizeable fee, I presume – to pose as your sister. Her instructions, no doubt, were to make the acquaintance of my family, and, acting as your spy, accuse my father of wrongdoing. You could not be satisfied with the judge’s verdict on the contesting of your father’s will, could you? Well, sir, your clever little accomplice lost no time in finding proof, but, alas, not the proof you expected. Her theft of a letter in my father’s possession has shown that Henry Francis was a blackmailer!”

“Do not say that, sir…”

Joe ignored Edward’s interruption. “Your father changed his will to repay my father because he feared God’s punishment. You see? Your fortune was made by illegal means – I will not scruple to say again, by
blackmail
. And now, by God’s will, it is back in the right hands.” He laughed humourlessly. “I see by the squalor of this room that you are already becoming used to doing without it!”

There was silence. Aurora wondered what Edward could do to protect her, or himself. Joe Deede seemed to have outwitted them.

“Very well, I deny it no longer.” Edward did not sound outwitted. He said the words stoutly, as a statement of fact. “My wife showed me the letter, and—”

Colour flooded Joe’s cheeks. “Your
wife
!”

“And I told her of my father’s grave affliction, as I will now tell you,” continued Edward. “For the last ten years of his life, my father was so crippled with rheumatism that he had to use an amanuensis.”

Joe made a sound like “Hrrmph!” He looked at Edward with contempt. “Such as you yourself?”

Edward did not fall into the trap. “I am aware that anyone, myself included, could have written that letter,” he told Joe frostily. “But if I were privy to whatever it is that your father will pay to keep secret, why have I not continued to blackmail him when my father died five months ago?”

Joe did not reply.

“Furthermore,” said Edward, “you persist in believing that my father altered his will because he was overcome with remorse about blackmailing your father. You say that he must have dictated that blackmail letter, and heaven knows how many others, to another person. Well, let me give you another version of the story. My father
did
know your father’s secret, but he took it with him to the grave, never considering using it to his advantage, though it was in his power to do so. Your father was tricked by the unspeakable villainy of the writer of those letters, and Henry Francis was never the blackmailer at all!”

Joe struck a frustrated blow to the mantelpiece, near where he stood. He could not refute the logic of Edward’s conclusion. “Henry Francis was a poor apology for a man!” he bellowed. Another blow. “A coward!” Another blow. “A man who made an enemy out of a friend, then stole his money! He was not a man, but a monstrous, godless beast!”

“Then what is
your
father?” Edward had been driven too far. “A man who murders his former friend in order to forge his will? It is not
my
father that is the godless beast, but yours!”

All the colour had gone from Joe Deede’s face. “Do you dare to accuse my father of
murder
?” he asked incredulously.

“Indeed I do. And of forgery and gross deception.” Edward’s words were followed by the sound of metal on metal. Aurora scrambled painfully to her feet. Swaying, she gripped the edge of the table. Edward had drawn his sword and was holding it upright before him, its blade six inches from his face. “I will fight to the death for my father’s honour,” he said stoutly.

Joe drew his own sword and, like Edward, held it upright “And so will I, for
my
father’s honour.”

Grimacing at the pain in her left arm, Aurora lunged with her other arm for Edward’s sword hand, like an anxious mother trying to remove a sharp stick from her son. “No! No!” she implored. “I beg you, do not do this. He will kill you. Please, do not allow him to incense you!”

“Peace!” Edward’s eyes had lost their glitter. They looked at her grimly. “I will deal with this.”

“No, Edward, I cannot stand aside and watch you place yourself in death’s way,” persisted Aurora. “This man is a swordsman, in constant practice. It is an unfair match.”

“Indeed it is,” said Joe Deede, tilting his chin. “Sir, you know not what awaits you.”

“It is a question of honour,” Edward told Aurora. “I cannot allow my father to stand accused of blackmail without demanding satisfaction on the matter.”

Aurora knew this. She also understood that Joe must defend his own father’s honour, and accept the challenge. She released Edward’s wrist and looked at Joe. Only last night she had wished she were truly Miss Drayton, free and ready to marry a man to whom she was attracted, and who was attracted to her. Now, as she looked at him standing before Edward in the mean little room, his raised sword glinting in the moonlight, his face full of the certainty of victory, she knew Joe Deede had duped her far more successfully than she had duped him.

“Very well,” she said bitterly. “Do your worst, the both of you.”

On the table lay her gloves, where she had discarded them when she came in. They were her new ones, made of kid leather edged with lace. Edward picked up the right-hand glove and threw it on the floor at Joe Deede’s feet. “I challenge you to defend the honour and reputation of your family.”

Joe stooped and picked up the glove. Aurora stared at it, invested as it was with an importance beyond its appearance, wondering if somehow its femininity could make void the masculine vow it represented. The desire to scream with horror constricted her throat.

“I accept the challenge,” said Joe. He dropped the glove, returned his sword to its sheath and bowed. “At dawn, sir, the day after tomorrow, upon Lincoln’s Inn Fields.”

Edward bowed too, and Joe strode from the room. Only when the sound of his footsteps had gone, and the street door had slammed, did Edward put down his own sword. “Remind me tomorrow,” he said, looking ruefully at Aurora, “to get this old thing sharpened.”

Aurora’s legs would no longer support her. She sat down on Edward’s bed. The room swung around her. “Edward,” she said, her voice sounding far away, as if it were someone else’s voice heard through a wall. “Edward, my husband, I beg you, do not do this.”

He removed his sword-belt and his wig, put them on the table and took off his coat. Not having yet been able to change his clothes, it was his best coat, the dark red one with gold-trimmed buttonholes. Under it he was still wearing the dishevelled shirt he had donned for Spring Gardens, his embroidered waistcoat and his dirtied breeches. He set the jacket on the back of the chair, rumpled his hair with the palm of his hand, and sighed deeply.

Aurora knew that all the time he was doing this he was thinking. It was becoming clear that he was much, much better at thinking than she was. Tears stung her eyes. “I am so sorry,” she said in a whisper. “I should have been more vigilant. I forgot the key. I have proved worse than useless to you; I have led you into mortal danger.” Her cheeks were wet with tears, but she made no attempt to wipe them away. “You must withdraw from the duel. Please, please…”

Gently, he took her hands in his. “I cannot withdraw. It is a question of honour. ”

“But you are not a match for Joe Deede!” she protested. “You do not follow sporting pursuits. You do not ride or hawk. You like books and music, and carry a sword only because it is part of every gentleman’s attire, like his wig or his waistcoat. Surely there is a less violent way to settle this dispute?”