This left Mrs Constantine and Allegra free to sit staring at each other across the breakfast table, a sadly crumpled newspaper between them. They’d passed it back and forth several times, and now Miss Constantine lowered her head and reread the relevant words in a dazed, uncomprehending fashion.
It wasn’t a prominently featured item, having been shouldered aside by all the foreign and political intelligence, but after receiving a cryptic message delivered by an anonymous messenger last night, they’d sent out for, received and scoured the morning’s papers, eventually finding what they agreed must bethe news they had been advised to look out for. It came on the third page of four, in among the advertisements, fashion reports, and the notices of births and deaths. It was a death notice of sorts too, Allegra supposed.TherehaslatelybeenatragicaccidentinPiccadilly, it said, and went on to tell how a young gentleman of quality, crossing the busy road with insufficient care yesterday afternoon, had been mown down and killed by a heavy dray waggon fully loaded with barrels. He had stumbled precipitately into the roadway from a crowded pavement, and the driver had been entirely unable to pull up his team of powerful shire horses in time to avert the gruesome collision, though he had exerted himself to try. Several female passers-by had swooned at the horrific sight. Before the writer began to indulge in sermonising about the dreadful, relentless nature of the traffic in London in modern times, stressing the need for greatercaution, alertnessandsobrietyon the part of pedestrians, the unfortunate victim of the accident was incompletely but sufficiently – for their purposes – described as a young gentleman of private means and aristocratic connections, originating from the Midland shires, just four and twenty years of age, a Mr J---- E------by.
‘Yesterday afternoon… It must be him,’ said Allegra, raising her wan face from the page and looking directly at her mother once more. ‘I can’t believe it, though I have read it a dozen times. Did we do this dreadful thing? Did I?’
‘Yes,’ Leontina replied slowly. She too was pale, but still resolute. ‘Yes, I suppose we did. I hope – I like to believe – that my father was not personally responsible. That it was not his hand in the small of Englishby’s back, shoving him all unwary under the wheels of the conveniently passing heavy waggon, or the crushing hooves of those great horses. That he had not been following him, waiting for such a perfect opportunity, seizing it when it came. He said that the man must have made dangerousenemies, and implied that they might take action after he spoke to them. Presumably that is what has happened, and happened so quickly it steals one’s breath. But we set this in motion between us. There’s no dodging that.’
And then, reacting to her daughter’s still stricken expression, she said with rough tenderness, ‘Allegra, he was prepared to ruin your life if you didn’t give him what he wanted. He’d have coerced you, raped you, and from what you have since told me of your encounter, he would have enjoyed doing it. We have no means of knowing if he’d done the same thing a dozen times before, to other girls and women who had no means of protecting themselves. He was a villain, a blackmailer. He brought on his own fate by his actions, his wicked and deliberate choices. Don’t mourn for him, because he doesn’t deserve it. Listen to me – women were just objects of use to him;hewouldhavedestroyedyou and walked away laughing.’
‘I know he would. I know that everything you say is right, Mama. But this…’
‘It has shaken me too,’ Leontina conceded. ‘I thought through the circumstances of my life I’d hardened myself against most things, but not this. I… I do not say that our family’s security, you girls’ future, is worth sacrificing another person’s life for. That would be monstrous. But unless my father has indeed done this terrible thing, I must tell myself and you that someone else has brought it about, for his own pressing reasons that have little to do with us, though we must have set it all in motion somehow.’
‘Just because… just because he knew things he should not know, and talked of them?’
‘I suppose just that. The world is a dangerous place.’
‘Should we feel safer in it, then, because of this? I don’t, Mama. Not at all.’
Leontina shivered. ‘I confess, nor do I just now.’
Her daughter swallowed and said with a passable show of firmness, ‘One thing, Mama… It has made me realise I cannot marry Lord Milton. It seems we have escaped now, but we might not, another time. He and his mother are so proud, so obsessed with their noble lineage – I can’t risk running up against that after tying myself irrevocably to him. Leaving her out of it, though that is hard enough, he’d never forgive me if he learned the truth. Our marriage would descend into the bitterest of recriminations. I hope you can see why I can’t bring myself to do it.’
‘Suddenly it doesn’t seem so important any more.’ Her mother shrugged indifferently. ‘And I won’t say you’re wrong, child. Sir Harry, then? You know he is your only choice.’
Tears closed Allegra’s throat and made speech impossible. After a little while she managed, ‘Not… I can’t talk about that now, Mama. Marriage, anything… Please don’t make me.’ Don’t sayhisname, she was thinking. Please don’t say his name. I can’t bear it.
Leontina rose, and dropped a rare kiss on her dark hair. ‘I understand,’ she said, sounding as if she might actually mean it. ‘We’re both overset today. I’m going to go and speak to Cook about why she can’t lay hands on a piece of good fish without turning it into a grey mess even the cat won’t touch. And this also is life.’
A mile or so away, Max was sitting in his library looking at the same newspaper, with similar feelings of responsibility roiling in his mind and in his suddenly uneasy gut. He’d come to it late, just now, having tried to banish the lingering spectres of an almost sleepless night with a long, hard ride alone in the park earlier in the morning.
TragicaccidentinPiccadilly. Their muttered words in that dark kitchen two nights ago had come out into the light and wrought a terribly real effect in the world, it seemed. He’d seen street incidents before, as everyone had, so it was all too easy to picture. Wildly neighing and plunging horses, cries and screaming, a broken figure in the roadway, blood. It was like a careless wish in a fairy tale, which had consequences far beyond what anyone could have anticipated. A word here, a whisper in the right ear, and then a death. A hideous death. He couldn’t doubt that Englishby had deserved some form of punishment, nor that his crimes were greater and more numerous than they would ever know, but this, so swift and sudden and relentless… It was terrifying. Who were these people? Since he had learned the truth about himself, his life had never seemed secure, and with good reason, but now he wondered: was anyone’s?
And then at last when the shock had receded a little, he thought dully,So it is over now. Allegra is free from the threats made against her, though I expect we will all be looking warily over our shoulders for a good long while. But this pressing danger of exposure no longer menaces her; she is free to marry Milton, or whomever she pleases, or nobody. Perhaps her mother will have a little mercy on her, after this horror and her part in it, and leave her in peace for a while. But whomever she marries, and surely in the end a woman so passionate and alive must marry someone, it will not be me.
It will not be me. If I am sensible, I should never see her again. I know this. I cannot be sure if meeting would cause her pain – but me? Yes. The pain of losing something that was never truly mine, and never could have been mine. Not in this life.
He rang the bell and called for brandy, with the intention of getting very, very drunk indeed, and wallowing deep in his misery until right at the bottom of it he found oblivion for a little while. It was not quite ten o’clock in the morning.
37
There was no need for a signal tonight, no discreet candle in the window to set in motion a message and a midnight visitor days later. Allegra and her mother knew that he would come without being summoned. They were both waiting.
For the first time, the three of them sat at the table together alone, in the odd intimacy of the dark kitchen. ‘I need not ask you if you saw the news,’ the old man said. ‘Your faces show that you did. And no, before you ask, Tinette, it was not me. I would gladly have done it with no regrets before or after, but as you have seen, the necessity was taken from me.’
‘The man you spoke of…?’ Allegra whispered, feeling an obscure reluctance to say his name, now she knew exactly how dangerous he was – as though he could be summoned like some ancient demon merely by speaking it aloud.
Her grandfather nodded. ‘I will tell you, because I think you need to know, and then we must never speak of this matter again. My acquaintance was in an unusually expansive mood. He told me that he knew the young man in question quite well – that he was aware he was a blackmailer of the ton, which was no concernof his, but that he had also been passing information to… certain other parties to enable them to commit robbery, and burglary. Which lady in all her jewels would be travelling back from a party, and by which route. Which house might be left poorly guarded on a certain evening. Which gentleman had won a large sum of money at cards and was wandering home drunk from a gambling club. Useful things, but dangerous, as I am sure you can perceive.’
‘And so?’ Leontina said flatly. ‘I would have thought that this would make the young man more valuable to him, rather than otherwise.’
Schiavi said, ‘My friend, though I hesitate to call him so, is a thief, but despite what you might think he is not greedy, nor is he a fool. It had occurred to him before this that he had allowed an uncomfortable sort of a relationship to develop between himself and the enterprising young gentleman. Perhaps he had been unwise, he admitted to me, to appear directly in such matters himself. He did not think that even the rashest blackmailer would be so foolish as to attempt to extorthim, not only because of the obvious risk of it, but because that would in itself be an admission of involvement in theft. The fellow would be exposing himself as much as his partner in crime – nobody would be foolish enough to do so without good cause.’
‘Of course,’ said Allegra with a touch of impatience. ‘So what had changed?’
‘My friend had already heard whispers that his accomplice had been drinking to excess, extending his blackmailing habits more widely than previously, and talking rather more freely than was wise. I told him what the villain had said to you, his claims of criminal friends, his threats – not revealing your identity or our relationship, naturally – and he slammed his hand down on the table, and said, “Enough!” You must understand that he is a mild-mannered sort of a man, generally – if you met him, which I devoutly hope you never do, you would not in the least suspect him for what he is. He almost never raises his voice. This was the closest I have seen him to angry, or even agitated. I promise you, it made a powerful impression on me. More than that, he has a trusted confederate who was present at our meeting, a pugilist of some repute, and the expression on his face at that moment chilled me. He rose and left the room after an exchange of glances between them. Not a word more was spoken, or not in my hearing.’
‘They must have thought that Englishby was risking arrest, and that if he was taken up he would without hesitation sell any information he had to save his miserable neck,’ Leontina mused.
