Chapter 5
More had been achieved by Ives’s visit than Padua’s reluctant agreement to no longer visit her father. Of more interest to Padua had been Ives’s reference to her father’s rooms on Wigmore Street.
Her father’s use of a mail drop all these years had been especially wounding.
She now knew where he lived, however. She hoped this was the property he had inherited too.
If so, she would not need to pay Mr. Notley ten shillings to locate that legacy.
And if her father used only some rooms in the building, perhaps that meant he let out the other rooms, and it served as a source of income.
She had to wait three days before she was able to leave the school with Mrs. Ludlow unawares.
Fortunately, Mrs. Ludlow had a ritual of social calls every Friday afternoon.
She always took Jennie with her because Jennie’s connections, severed though they might be in reality, enhanced Mrs. Ludlow’s social standing and even opened a few doors.
Padua bided her time until then. As soon as the hired carriage bore them away, she donned her spencer and bonnet and let herself out the garden door.
Time would be short today, so she hired a hackney and gave the driver the name of the street.
She hoped it was not far away and she could walk back.
It surprised her when the carriage stopped on a street near the northeastern edge of Piccadilly.
She paid the fare, stepped out, and took a good look at her surroundings.
There was nothing fashionable about Wigmore Street.
The houses appeared solid, and she guessed many of them contained several homes.
Since she did not know which was her father’s, she asked at a grocer’s on one corner.
She did not have to describe her father in much detail for the proprietor to recognize the man she wanted.
He pointed her to a brick house on the next block that stood three stories tall over its raised cellar.
A blond woman sat at the window of the first storey. Padua asked after Mr. Belvoir.
“He lives above,” the woman said. “He is not there now. Hasn’t been for some weeks.”
“Does he own this building?”
The woman laughed until she cried. “That odd duck own this building?” She wiped her eyes with the edge of her apron. “What would he know with owning a building. Nah, he lets his rooms same as I let mine, thank you.”
Padua opened the door. She mounted the stairs leading to the next level.
As expected, the door to her father’s rooms had not been locked. Hadrian Belvoir would never bother with such practicalities. When she entered, she had to admit there would be little purpose in doing so anyway, because he had nothing to steal.
A monk might live like this, in chambers crammed with books that overflowed the cases into stacks on tables and floors.
A writing table, all but barricaded into a corner of the sitting room, held a heap of papers.
Padua made her way to it and examined those pages.
Few words had been written. Most of them carried numbers and mathematical notations.
Her father had long been in search of impossible proofs.
He would not be the first man to spend his life in such pursuits, only to fail.
She looked around, wondering where all this counterfeit money had been stored.
From what she could tell, there was no room for it.
She wandered into the bedchamber. There she found a conspicuous void near one wall.
It appeared a trunk once stood there but no longer did.
Its outline could be traced on the floorboards by the absence of any other items.
She had hoped to find proof no large stash of money had been here, so the conspicuous void disheartened her. Her father clearly lived here, but why? If he had inherited property, why would he not live there?
Unfortunately she suspected she knew the answer to that. He had probably sold that property long ago. She would not be surprised if someone had cheated him by paying too little, or even not at all. It would be just like her father to sign over the deed and forget to collect the payment for it.
Discouraged, she returned to the sitting room, and began choosing books to be delivered to the prison. She had withdrawn two, when a small volume bound in red caught her eye. She pulled it out. It was one of the schoolbooks she had used as a girl. It touched her that Papa had saved it.
She flipped it open to see if her childish signature still marked its first page. A banknote fell out and fluttered to the floor. Twenty pounds. She picked it up, then fanned the pages. No more money.
Her gaze went to the books, searching. She spied another thin red binding. She checked that book, and found another ten pounds. Excited, she looked again, and saw a third book.
She pushed the piles of journals and pamphlets off a table, in order to make room for her schoolbooks.
Her excavations revealed a wooden box beneath one pile that distracted her.
She remembered it from her childhood. Her mother had kept this box in her dressing room.
Seeing it again called forth memories and feelings, all of them warm and nostalgic.
Back then it stored gloves. It did not store gloves now.
Instead a stack of letters filled it. The letters carried her mother’s scent, she was sure, and their mere existence entranced her.
She set the schoolbooks down, to be dealt with later, and stuffed the banknotes in her bodice, to get them out of the way too. She dumped books off a chair and sat.
The letters were mostly in her mother’s hand, but her father had written a few. The dates indicated these were old, from before Padua’s birth. Her heart trembled while she looked at her mother’s handwriting. Finally, she unfolded one of the letters and read it.
* * *
Lance agreeing to quit town for Merrywood was not the same as Lance actually getting in the coach and leaving. Ives visited for breakfast, dawdled in conversation up in Lance’s dressing room, and generally remained underfoot until Lance, with annoyance, told his valet to pack.
“I expect I will see you next week,” Lance said just as the coach began to roll.
“Damnation, don’t you dare come back that quickly.”
“Not here. In Merrywood.” The vehicle jostled forward.
Ives had no intention of spending the last part of his precious respite entertaining Lance in the country. “Do not count on it,” he called after the coach.
Lance stuck his head out the window and looked back. “A fine brother you are. Gareth brings his bride home from their travels and you do not bother to come down to greet them.”
Ives called for the coach to stop. He paced to that window and peered in. “Gareth is returning next week?”
“Did I neglect to tell you that?”
“You did.”
“I received a letter two or three days ago. Maybe four.” He pondered the detail as if it mattered.
So much for week two of unencumbered freedom. “I will be there, of course.”
“We will go hunting.”
“Wonderful.” He tapped the coach, to signal the driver to continue. The coach rolled.
A head appeared at the window again. “Did I also neglect to mention she is with child? Eva, that is.”
The coach turned onto the street. The head disappeared. Ives wondered just how drunk Lance had been the last fortnight.
* * *
It was past three o’clock before Ives made his way to Wigmore Street. He tied his horse near the crossroads and approached Belvoir’s building on foot.
He noticed two things as he walked. The first was a fellow dawdling several doors down from Belvoir’s.
He managed to appear busy without actually doing anything.
Ives thought it likely a watch had been set on Belvoir’s abode.
That was not something that a magistrate had the resources to do, which would mean the Home Office had involved itself far more than Strickland would ever admit.
He then saw an unexpected face from the past. A woman with an elaborate style to her brassy hair sat in the window on the first storey. When she looked out as he approached, Ives recognized her.
She pasted on a smile, but her gaze carried unmistakable hatred.
Ives could not blame her for her reaction.
Two years ago her common-law husband, Harry Trenholm, had been transported after a trial in which Ives prosecuted.
The charges had been arson and sedition, for burning down a factory near Liverpool, one owned by an industrialist who had contributed plenty of fuel to the confrontation that ended in those flames.
As for the sedition—Trenholm had cloaked his act in political rhetoric to justify himself.
The fool hired to defend failed to make sufficient use of that factory owner’s provocations, or of the fact no one had been injured.
Ives artfully did instead, thus keeping this woman’s husband from the gallows.
She could be excused if she did not appreciate the effort.
Her man disappeared anyway, and was dead to her for all intents and purposes.
He paused on the building’s stoop. “Mrs. Trenholm. It is always nice to see a familiar face when on a strange street.”
“The pleasure is all yours, I am sure.”
“How do you fare these days?”
She gritted her teeth behind her smile. That made her already prominent chin cut forward more. “Life goes on. What brings you here? Not the sort of street that sees many of your sort, or carriages like that one down there.”
“I am seeking the home of Mr. Belvoir.”
“You, too, eh. Well, up one set of stairs and there you are. What’s he done to make you interested in him? He must be in gaol. That explains why it is so silent up there these past weeks, doesn’t it?”
“Do you know him well?”
“He’s a strange one and keeps to himself. I figured he mighta died up there. I’ve been waiting for the smell to tell me so. I’ve no time for crazy men like him. I work in a flower shop now, and I’ve a new gentleman in my life, so I am not here most days.”
“I am glad to see that life indeed goes on for you. Tell me, what did you mean when you said, You too? Has someone else visited Mr. Belvoir’s rooms?”
Her eyes looked upward. “A woman. She’s up there now. She has been for over an hour.”
“An attractive woman with very dark hair?” And porcelain skin and star-filled eyes with lashes thick and dark?
“Attractive? Hardly. She is freakishly tall. That is all one notices about her, how she is as tall as some men.”
What a ridiculous description of Miss Belvoir.
Anyone with a discerning eye could see that her height gave her elegance, distinction, and presence.
She pulled it off so well because she did not try to do anything in the false hope it would make her appear smaller to stupid women like Mrs. Trenholm, whose flamboyant hair and painted face marked her as without taste.
He let himself in, and walked up the stairs. No sounds came from above. No steps on the floorboards. Perhaps Mrs. Trenholm was wrong, and Padua Belvoir no longer remained in her father’s chambers. A note of disappointment played in his head, surprising him.
The door to the chambers stood open. He looked in. Padua had not left yet. She sat on a wooden chair. Beside her, on a small table, lay an open glove box.
She read something. Whatever it was had transfixed her, and affected her entire being. Her face appeared very soft and young and vulnerable. The chamber’s dusty light bathed her and made her skin luminous. Not merely attractive. Beautiful.
It seemed a cruel intrusion to interrupt whatever thoughts her mind contained. So he remained across the threshold, waiting for her to return to herself.