Jason, Veronica Read online

  Now he realized that over the years he had come to value the fisherman's quiet daughter for her own sake, so much so that he would miss her when he returned to Stanford Hall, so much so that now the thought of her having met with some accident brought him sharp anxiety. But no, Maude Reardon, like many of the Irish, had a dreamy, feckless streak. She must have laid his message aside, been unable to find it, and then decided that the appointment was for an hour later than he had stipulated. After all, when he had entertained the Cobbins and his ward and her aunt at supper the previous week, he had asked them for eight o'clock.

  With a murmured apology for turning his back, he moved to the front window, a tall, lean man in black velvet coat and breeches. He looked down. Here in Darnley Square, one of the fine residential areas developed during the last few years as London spread west and north, the streetlamps were more closely spaced, affording the rich householders added protection against night prowlers. He realized that he was fortunate to have lodgings—a bedroom and sitting room—in this fine house, with meals cooked and served by a manservant and his wife in permanent employment here. The house's owners, a socially ambitious merchant and his wife, now on a long tour of the continent, were glad to charge a baronet only a nominal sum for lodgings during the London season. And that was fortunate, because Sir Patrick had other uses for his money. He needed it for buying fine clothes in which to appear in London ballrooms. He needed it for nights at the gaming tables with profligate Englishmen he despised, and with Anglo-Irish landlords, absent most of the year from their estates, whom he despised even more.

  Directly below him, the Cobbins' carriage stood at the curb, with its driver huddled in his cloak against the night's chill. Directly opposite, a sedan chair and two carriages stood before Lord and Lady Armitage's house. Evidently they had bidden friends to a small gathering, probably a whist party. One night the previous week he had gone to a well-attended ball in that house, and the season before, to an even larger one.

  As sometimes happened, a memory from mat night nearly a year ago crossed his mind. Elizabeth Montlow, that young woman with the glossy chestnut hair and direct, intelligent gray eyes. It was not just her beauty that had caught his attention, although she was indeed beautiful, with classic features, and a slender-waisted, high-breasted body molded by a satin gown the same shade of gray as her eyes. What also had impressed him was the fact that she appeared to have reached twenty-one or -two, a somewhat advanced age in London society for a young woman, especially such a lovely one, to be still unmarried. He also noticed that her face, in a roomful of beauties with white complexions made even more so by powder, had a light golden tinge. When they met in the figures of the dance, he had said, "I notice that you do not affect the London pallor."

  She smiled, showing a fugitive dimple, and widened her eyes in mock astonishment "How perceptive you are, sir."

  Later, during the interval between a schottische and a gavotte, they had chatted for a few moments over glasses of punch. "Tell me," he had persisted, "why it is that you are not like the other ladies, shunning sunlight as the devil shuns holy water?"

  "I live in the country most of the time. I love to walk, and to ride. Should I go about swathed in veils ten months of the year, just so that I can present a fashionable London paleness the other two?"

  He looked down at her, sensing in her a rare forthrightness and independence of mind. How was it that she, part of a world in which drawling, languid artificiality was the rule for both sexes, could have developed such qualities?

  And then he'd had a sudden vision of himself and this young woman, riding side by side across his own green fields and hills through the misty Irish sunlight, toward where the land dropped away to a rocky beach and the Irish channel. He sensed that a man, married to her, might be one of those rare husbands in love with his own wife.

  And she? Was it because she hoped to marry a man she could love that she was still a spinster?

  The orchestra, seated on a platform at one end of the mirror-hung ballroom, had begun to play again, and Elizabeth's partner for that dance had come to claim her. But the next evening at Harry's Coffee House Patrick had made inquiries about her. A fat young marquis, far gone in his cups, had been especially informative.

  The Montlows, he said, were of an old but untitled family, with a country estate, called the Hedges, about fifteen miles north of London. They also had a town house, only a few hundred yards off Darnley Square, on Kingman Street. The family consisted of the widowed Mrs. Montlow and her daughter and son, a youth still at Oxford.

  "The house and the country estate are entailed to the son," the marquis said. "But there's twenty thousand pounds held in trust for the daughter. It's to be paid to her when she is twenty-five, or before that, if she marries." He added sourly, "But she'll probably die an old maid, since she's so proud. Although why she should be proud, I don't know. Twenty thousand is no great fortune."

  "She's had suitors?"

  "Aplenty, but she's turned them all down." Patrick suspected that the marquis had been one of those turned down. "They say she may marry a neighbor's son, a fellow who never gets to town. Plans to be a parson, once the living his uncle controls falls vacant."

  The marquis looked up at him with drunken slyness. "Thinking of trying your luck there? I'll admit she's an appetizing wench. But twenty thousand pounds isn't much. A baronet, even an Irish baronet, ought to be able to do better than that"

  Patrick chose to ignore the slur upon his Irishness. The fellow was drunk. Besides, even before the reign of Charles II, when Patrick's great-grandfather had been awarded an estate confiscated from an Irish rebel, the Stanfords had been landed English gentry for several generations.

  And the fellow was right about twenty thousand pounds' being no great fortune. Patrick hoped to acquire a wife with more than that, much more. Besides, if Elizabeth Montlow's taste ran to parsons, she would scarcely fancy an agnostic such as himself. He had abandoned the idea of calling upon the Montlows in their town house on Kingman Street. Since then he had given only an occasional rueful thought to the girl with the gray eyes and golden skin.

  Now, still looking down in the square, he reflected that perhaps after all, when he returned to Ireland, he should marry Moira. A widow of twenty-seven, Moira—Lady Moira Ashley—received rents from more than two hundred tenant farmers working the land of the three estates she had inherited from her husband and from her own family, the Rawlings. And lord only knew she was good-looking enough. Over the generations, the Rawlings, like the Stanfords, had intermarried with the native Irish. Moira's beauty was entirely Irish. Glossy hair so dark that, like a blackbird's wing, it showed blue highlights. Eyes of such a dark blue that by candlelight they looked black. Skin the shade of rich country cream. And there was a boldness about her full-lipped face, and in the way her curving, almost buxom body moved, that made any man want to take her to bed. According to rumor, at least a few had, including the steward who managed her estates.

  For a minute or so one day the previous summer Patrick had thought that he was about to take her to bed. After attending an auction of thoroughbred horses, they had returned to Wetherly, the vast house of gray stone left to her by her husband. In the salon, after a footman had brought sherry and Irish whiskey and then left the room, Patrick had drawn her into his arms. As he kissed her yielding mouth, her body had pressed close against his. But when his lips had sought her swelling breasts, left almost naked by her low-cut gown, she had broken free of him. "No, Patrick."

  "Why not?" Plainly she wanted him. Desire had expanded her pupils until her eyes were almost black, and had brought a faint flush not only to her face, but to her throat and bosom.

  She said, "You will have to marry me first."

  Thwarted and angry, he had said in a cold voice, "You do me too great an honor, madam," and turned toward the door. When he reached it, though, he turned back.

  "Moira, I'm sorry I said that. We have been friends and good neighbors for a long time. I ho
pe we always will be. But marriage is something that deserves long and serious consideration."

  "Besides, you hope to marry some rich virgin, so that you will be reasonably sure that your children are your own."

  He was silent. It had indeed occurred to him that with Lady Moira a man would never be quite certain on that point.

  "But if you think you would have to worry about that with me," she said, "you're wrong, Patrick. Married to you, I would be faithful."

  He had moved to her then, kissed her lightly, and said, "We will talk of it another time. I must go now. Colin and I have some estate business to attend to."

  Now, behind Patrick, Jeremiah Cobbin cleared his throat. Patrick turned and looked at the mantel clock. Its hands pointed to three minutes of eight. "Perhaps I had better send someone to see..."

  Breaking off, he turned back to the window. "They are here," he said with relief. Another carriage had stopped directly behind the Cobbins' vehicle. The driver got down from the box, opened the carriage door, and let down the steps.

  Only Maude Reardon descended. And it was obvious from the agitated manner in which she spoke to the driver, and from the way she climbed the steps with unwonted haste, that something was very wrong.

  "Please excuse me," he said to the Cobbins, and hurried out of the room and down the stairs. He had the door open before the knocker sounded twice.

  Maude Reardon, bonnet awry, face deathly white, cried, "Oh, Sir Patrick!" Then, with a whimper: "Oh, dear holy Mary, mother of God."

  He grasped the plump shoulders. "Maude! What is it?"

  "It's Anne, sir. She's been taken to Guy's Hospital."

  "She's been hurt? How?" His voice sharpened. "Answer me!"

  "I don't rightly know, sir. She was found in the area-way of a house back there on Kingman Street. They say she fell from an upstairs window, or was pushed. And, oh, sir! The poor child had been stripped naked."

  She began to weep. Shock held him numb and silent for several seconds. Then he gave her shoulders a shake and said, "Maude! Try to tell me what you know."

  Sobbing, at times incoherent, she told him. The cart that had locked wheels with the hired carriage. Anne's decision to go on by foot. The two drivers' long struggle with their entangled vehicles, while other carriages waited behind them.

  Finally other drivers had joined in the task, and after a while the carriage's wheel had been lifted free—only to slide sidewise on its axle and break beneath the vehicle's weight.

  Left stranded, Maude had promised a street urchin a copper if he would find another public carriage for her. He had darted away down a cross street. Perhaps twenty minutes had passed before he returned, perched on the driver's step of a carriage. Maude had handed the boy his copper, and given the driver Sir Patrick's address.

  Farther along Kingman Street, the carriage had slowed, then halted. Maude had poked her head out of the window.

  "There was a carriage in front of the house up ahead, and a small crowd on the sidewalk. Two men was carrying someone into the carriage, someone wrapped in a blanket. Then I saw her red hair and I knew—oh, my God, sir—I knew it was our little Anne."

  Maude had gotten out of the hired carriage just as the vehicle holding Anne had driven away. Moving as fast as her asthma would allow, she joined the sidewalk crowd.

  "There was one of Sir John Fielding's bailiffs there, the ones they call Bow Street Runners. I guess someone had gone to fetch him after it... happened."

  "Did he talk to you?" Patrick forced the words through a throat that had grown hard with pain and gathering fury.

  "Yes, sir. After I told him who I was, he took my name and address and told me what he knew."

  It was a maid in the house opposite, the Bow Street Runner told her, who had been a witness, probably the only witness. Retiring to her garret room after fourteen hours of hard work, she had looked down from her window, to see something odd going on in front of the area-way across the street. A group of men, five or six of them, were there on the sidewalk. "The Runner told me the maid said they was young gentlemen, to judge by the look of them." One of them was carrying something or somebody.

  Too curious now to sleep, the housemaid had kept watch. She had seen a faint glow for a minute or so through the front door's fanlight. After that, darkness and silence. She had been about to go to bed when again she saw faint light, this time beyond a long window in the upper story. Then had come the sound of shattering glass, and a drawn-out, despairing scream, and the sight of a thin white body hurtling down through the night.

  The housemaid had hurried down to tell her employers, who were still at supper. It was they who told the Bow Street Runner their housemaid's story, and who volunteered their carriage to take the girl to the hospital.

  "He said she seemed to be in a bad way, sir." Maude wept. "She may be dying."

  "Go on upstairs. Wait for me."

  He turned around. They were standing on the stairs, faces shocked and outraged, the respectable couple who would never be Anne's parents-in-law, the nondescript young man who would never be her husband.

  With cold rage swelling his heart, he said, "You must excuse me." He went down the steps and into the carriage Maude Reardon had left waiting.

  CHAPTER 3

  Young gentlemen, he thought, as the carriage moved forward. He knew of them, those groups of wellborn youths who prowled London by night.

  They were aping the Hellfire Club, of course, that group of aristocratic debauchees who met for their orgies well outside London, in the ancient ruins of St. Mary's Abbey at Medmenham. There such profligates as Lord Sandwich and Sir Peter Dashwood, robed and cowled and chanting obscene parodies of Christian liturgy, celebrated the Black Mass and tried to summon up the devil. To a religious skeptic like Patrick Stanford, their blasphemous antics would have seemed merely absurd—except that part of their ritual required the raping of virgins on the ancient altar. In the countryside around Medmenham, the wretched and powerless poor whispered of torchlight flickering at night through the abbey's ruins, and of chanting mingled with terrified screams, and of girls, some as young as twelve, wandering dazed and bleeding along the roadsides in the early morning.

  Already vicious, but too young to be welcomed by the Hellfire Club, a number of aristocratic youths had formed into gangs. They gave themselves the names of American Indian tribes—the Mohawks, the Algonquians, the Saginaws. And at night they moved through the ill-lit London streets, robbing the well-dressed, assaulting the penniless, and raping any girl found alone and unprotected in the darkness.

  Patrick Stanford was sure that it was such a group who had seized his ward.

  Up ahead, a small sidewalk crowd still lingered before one of a solid row of houses. Despite his anxiety to get to Anne, he rapped with his stick on the cab's trapdoor, signaling the driver to stop. A bulky man with the authoritative air of a Bow Street Runner turned around. As if sensing that the carriage's passenger belonged to the gentry, he moved briskly forward and raised a crooked forefinger to his tricorne hat. "Good evening, sir."

  "My name is Sir Patrick Stanford. I already know something of what occurred here. Do you have any idea who they were, the men who carried the girl into this house?"

  "No, sir, except it appears they was housebreakers. There's a broken window into the scullery, and the door is locked, so I guess that's how they got in, through the window."

  "And the girl has been taken to Guy's Hospital?"

  "Yes, sir, in St. Thomas Street"

  "One more thing. Whose house is this?"

  "It belongs to a family named Montlow. The people across the way told me the place has been empty since last winter. The ladies, Mrs. Montlow and her daughter, are in the country, and the young gentleman, Mr. Montlow, is away at Oxford."

  Patrick again looked at the house, recognizing it now. It was the house where once, before he had decided against it, he had thought of calling on the girl with the chestnut hair, sun-warmed complexion, and clear gray eyes.

&nb
sp; "Thank you," he said.

  Again the Bow Street Runner touched his hat. Patrick rapped on the trapdoor for the driver to proceed. As the carriage rattled forward over the cobblestones, he wondered how she would feel, that girl with the sensitive, intelligent face, when she learned of the brutal violence that had taken place in her house.

  The brother, "the young gentleman away at Oxford." Could it be that he was one of...? But no. Surely he would have no need to break into his own house.

  Unless the shattered window was a trick, designed to mislead the authorities....

  He hoped Elizabeth Montlow's brother was not one of those degenerates. But if he were, he would pay for it. If the Prince of Wales himself were among those who had taken Anne into that house, he would pay for it.

  Thirty minutes later, he moved beside a doctor through a series of lofty-ceilinged, dimly lighted hospital wards. Occasionally a groan or a strangled snoring came from one of the beds set in cubicles against the walls. Otherwise there was no sound except the hollow tread of their footsteps. Now and then the doctor raised his walking stick and sniffed at something, undoubtedly perfume, carried inside its knob. Patrick did not have to wonder about the reason. With the windows tightly closed against the "infectious" night air, the series of rooms was redolent of sweat, excrement, and bitter medicines. Patrick, though, was too filled with anxiety and rage to be more than dimly aware of the foul air.

  The doctor, plump in his floor-length gown and flat velvet cap, conducted him through another doorway. "This is the ward. I fear, Sir Patrick, that there is little hope. We have not bled her. Bleeding is of no efficacy against multiple fractures of the bones. No doubt, too, the spleen has been ruptured, releasing foul humors throughout the body...."