Chapter Four
M rs. Anderson had rooms in a late seventeenth-century townhouse that had probably once been home to a merchant or perhaps minor gentry. It was narrow—two windows wide, but four stories high, not including the basement and the attic.
A woman was waiting at the door, her pleasant face creased with worry which turned to amazement as she watched Ben hand Mrs. Anderson down, not waiting for the two burly servants Mrs. Dove-Lyon had sent with them. “Just in case,” she had said. Just in case what? Mrs. Anderson needed something heavy to be lifted? Seward sent men to harass Mrs. Anderson?
“My landlady,” Mrs. Anderson murmured to him as she stepped past him to greet the lady. Ben asked the men to wait with the carriage and then allowed himself to be introduced to Mrs. Simmons, who was torn between deference to his lofty title and suspicion about his intentions toward the widow. She clearly regarded Mrs. Anderson as her own to protect and defend.
“I knew Lord Somerford when Mr. Anderson was under his command, Mrs. Simmons,” Mrs. Anderson reassured the older woman. “He is a good man. A fine gentleman. And today, he came to my rescue.”
She gave the woman a short account of the arrest and what had followed. “So,” she concluded, “Mrs. Dove-Lyon has suggested that I stay with her for a few days. Just until everything is sorted out.”
Ben thought the moment was ripe to warn the landlady against letting anyone into Mrs. Anderson’s rooms while she was absent. “This fellow Seward might make an attempt to cause trouble for Mrs. Anderson here,” he said. “I trust you will refuse anyone who asks to be shown up to her rooms, or who tells you a tarradiddle about her reputation.”
“Leave it to me, my lord,” said Mrs. Simmons, stoutly. “Let them come, and if they try to get past me, they shall feel the weight of my broom, and so they shall.”
“I will leave a card with my address,” he told her. “Let me know if anyone comes.”
Mrs. Anderson had her rooms on the fourth floor. Two of them. The sitting room, through which they entered, was at the back of the house with a window that looked out on a depressing tangle of back yards full of washing and other evidence of industrious activity.
The little bedroom was in the middle of the house and windowless. Mrs. Anderson had to light a lamp to retrieve the clothing and other items she needed for their stay.
By the time she was ready, she had a large bag she said was her sewing, and a much smaller one containing all she needed for herself and the boy. This was quite unlike his sister and his stepmother, who needed a second carriage to carry their trunks. Ben reminded himself that Mrs. Anderson had followed the drum. She was used to packing at a moment’s notice and getting by on very little.
Ben returned her to the Lyon’s Den, promised to visit the following day, and returned home, determined to find out what was driving Seward into his dastardly acts. But how? That was the question.
The obvious next step was to visit the Duke of Kempbury and see if that gentleman harbored animus toward his brother’s widow. Ben would be surprised if it was so. He had met the duke during the past year—they were on some of the same parliamentary committees—and the man seemed pleasant, if austere and remote.
By now, it was late in the afternoon, but Ben called on the duke, only to be told that he had gone into the country for a few days.
Perhaps, then, Ben thought, he should go straight to the horse’s mouth, as it were, and talk to Seward. The man was a member at Whites. Ben hoped to find him there, for if he was not successful, he was doomed to trawl through the lowest gambling dens in London, the only ones that had not yet barred the dishonorable Seward from their premises.
The third floor at the Lyon’s Den was given over to rooms used by ladies of pleasure to entertain gentlemen. They didn’t live at the Lyon’s Den, apparently, but they often stayed overnight when working. Dorcas found that out when she fell into conversation with one of those ladies the following morning.
She had taken Stephen with her down to the kitchen to talk with the cook about suitable meals for a four-year-old. Once they were agreed, Dorcas sat down, with Stephen on her knee, to feed him what the cook had made while they were talking—toast smothered with jam. It was a generous treat that Dorcas had only been able to afford on special occasions. She was afraid he would find their usual simple meals hard after this time of plenty, but she would not refuse him on that account. Let him enjoy chocolate biscuits, jam, and the pudding promised for dinner. The reality of their life could wait until later.
The third-floor lady was also sitting at the table. She was dressed in a robe that was belted at the waist with a sash. Her bright copper hair was loose around her shoulders. Dorcas admired her pale complexion and sparkling blue eyes, not to mention the womanly figure revealed by the robe. She had the kind of looks that Ves used to admire—the kind of looks that made Dorcas feel insignificant.
“Good morning,” Dorcas said, refusing to allow her own feelings of inadequacy to affect how she dealt with others.
“Hello, love,” said the lady. “You’re new.”
“She’s not for the third floor,” said the cook. “A proper lady, this one. A widow. She is staying on the fourth, with herself.”
The lady raised her eyebrows but held out a hand for Dorcas to shake. “Scarlett Brown,” she said. Her eyes dared Dorcas to refuse the introduction.
“Dorcas Anderson,” said Dorcas. “And this is my son, Stephen.”
“Nice to meet you, Dorcas. Hello, Master Anderson.”
Master Seward, but Dorcas saw no point in the correction. “Call him Stephen,” she invited.
Miss Brown rewarded that with a smile. “Hello, Stephen,” she tried, and Stephen looked up from his toast to give her a jammy grin.
“You just here on a visit, Mrs. Anderson?” Miss Brown asked.
“It is complicated. Mrs. Dove-Lyon has given me refuge. I am a widow, and my former brother-in-law tried to have me arrested.”
Miss Brown gave a huff of amazement. “Nasty. And I thought my family was trouble.”
“Lord Augustus has always disapproved of me,” Dorcas commented. “But I have left him alone, and I cannot see why he does not leave me alone.”
The woman’s eyes widened with recognition. “Not Lord Augustus Seward?” said Miss Brown.
At Dorcas’s nod, she huffed again and said, “Lord Disgusting Sewer was banned from the Lyon’s Den after spreading gossip about one of the Black Widow’s matchmaking schemes, but before that, he was banned from the third floor. Nasty man. None of us would entertain him. Here, we can make up our own minds about which clients to accept, you know. Mrs. Dove-Lyon does not interfere with how we run our business as long as—” she changed her voice to a more nasal and pompous drone that sounded nothing like Mrs. Dove-Lyon—“You do not disgrace the good name this house has for quality and integrity.”
Dorcas had never considered that prostitutes, like any business, might be distinguished by their quality and integrity, or lack thereof, although she had been on friendly terms with camp followers who offered similar services.
“I know the brothel he goes to now,” Miss Brown said. “I can ask the girls if he has said anything about you. It’s amazing what men will say in front of their whores. They don’t think of us as people, of course. For them, talking to us is like talking to their dog or their horse.”
She was not complaining, just stating a fact about the life she knew in the same way that Dorcas would say that a particular set of napkins required more embroidery thread in a particular shade of rose pink.
She considered what Miss Brown proposed and decided it could not hurt. “If they can find something out without putting themselves in danger, I would be grateful,” she told the woman.
“It’s too late to visit now,” said Miss Brown. “I’ll see them on my way back to work. My last-night gent slept over, Mrs. Anderson, but he’s away to home now, and so am I. Home and bed. Thanks for the toast, Cookie.” She waved her crust at the cook, wrinkled her nose at Stephen, making him laugh, and gave Dorcas another warm smile. “You be good now, you hear?”
As she left, two other girls came into the kitchen, also in robes, and another followed a few minutes later. So it was that Dorcas had her breakfast, and Stephen his, surrounded by prostitutes and listening to their conversation. They were cheerful and friendly. Dorcas enjoyed their company and so did Stephen. Lord Somerford would be horrified.
Ben had given up on finding Seward the night before, after trawling through a dozen awful dives. He woke the following morning determined to track the man down. He had a couple of other engagements for the day, but making Mrs. Anderson safe was his priority.
Perhaps the next step was to find Seward’s friends. One of them, Tiberius Hastings, who had once been betrothed to Ben’s sister, was now in a private asylum after attempting to drown Laurel for breaking off the betrothal. But Seward ran with a pack of other dissolute fools.
There was no point in looking for any of them before noon so in the interim, Ben would meet with his secretary and also call at the Lyon’s Den to visit Mrs. Anderson. Not because he was inappropriately anxious to see her, but because he had been charged with her care, so it was his duty.
They would not let him up onto Mrs. Dove-Lyon’s floor, but they showed him to one of the little sitting rooms on the floor above the gaming den, and a few minutes later, Mrs. Anderson joined him, accompanied by the little boy and his soldier doll.
“I have not yet been able to talk to Seward,” he admitted, once they had exchanged greetings.
“I was wondering whether it would be possible to find the man who gave Stephen the apple,” Mrs. Anderson commented. “He was on his way to market, and the apples in his baskets were of exceptional size. Surely there cannot be many apple sellers with apples that are so large?”
It was worth a try. If it could be shown Seward was lying about the theft, then his entire case collapsed. “When we say exceptionally large,” he said, “what size are we talking?”
The shape she made with her hands was about five inches around. “I thought I might go to the market and look for him myself,” she said. “I would recognize him, you see.”
“Not without escort,” Ben objected. “We need a reputable witness with you whenever you go out, Mrs. Anderson, in case Seward tries something else.”
Mrs. Anderson accepted his argument without demur, and when they left the Lyon’s Den some thirty minutes later, Mrs. Anderson was on Ben’s arm, and a couple of Mrs. Dove-Lyon’s wolves (as she called her doormen-come-bodyguards) paced behind them.
Stephen had been left behind in the kitchen, where the cook and the maids had promised to keep him entertained. Last seen, he had been standing on a stool at the kitchen table, wrapped in a drying cloth as an apron, rolling out scraps of pastry.
Covent Garden market was not far away, but it was crowded, and they had almost completed the circuit of the area before Mrs. Anderson pulled her hand away and hurried up to a man who was loading empty baskets into a cart.
“Sir,” she said. “Sir, was it not you whom I met yesterday morning, on the Strand?”
He turned, a cheerful fellow in his middle years, with a girth that hinted at the pleasures he enjoyed at table and twinkling blue eyes. “It is the lady who helped me pick up my apples. How do you do, ma’am? How is your sweet little boy? Did he enjoy his apple pie?”
Ben gave a sigh of relief. The man could not have been a better witness.
And when Ben and Mrs. Anderson explained the situation to him, so he proved to be. He insisted on heading to the magistrate’s court without further ado and swearing a statement. “My brother, here, and my son shall say the same. I’ll leave them here with the stall, but they can make a statement if needed. And I daresay them constables can find a dozen other people—or more—who were on The Strand near Charing Cross, and who saw the whole thing.”
He had another thought. “Furthermore, if you have the apple, it proves it, for I am the only person within carting distance of London who grows Peasgood Nonesuch, and if you, ma’am, did not get it from me, then there’s nowhere else you could have got it.”
Mrs. Anderson leaned heavily on Ben’s arm as if she was dizzy with relief. “The officers at the Bow Street Magistrate’s Court have taken the apple as evidence,” she said. “You will be able to see it when we get there.”
“Well then, ma’am. Let them show me the apple, and let’s be finished with this.”
The dastardly Seward would be foiled, Mrs. Anderson would be free to return to her home, and Ben would be free to return to his other duties. Ben’s heart sank a little at the thought.
At Bow Street, a different clerk was on the desk, and when Ben gave his name and title, the man was quick to fetch Officer Fairlie. Fairlie was delighted to meet the apple seller—his name was Bert Grummidge. “I’ll take your statement, Mr. Grummidge if you will just step this way, and yes, the apple will be in the property lockup.”
But it wasn’t. No one could explain what had become of it, but eventually one of the younger constables discovered an apple core in a rubbish bin. It was twice the size of a normal apple, and Grummidge declared it to be a Peasgood Nonesuch, even though not much of it was left, and even what was there was brown and gnawed.
“That’s good enough for me,” Fairlie told Ben and Mrs. Anderson, “but I will put the information to the magistrate to see if he requires further information.” He glowered. “And I shall find out who has been eating our evidence. If you can just be patient until I send word to the earl, Mrs. Anderson.”
Ben took Mrs. Anderson back to the Lyon’s Den. “I beg you to stay with Mrs. Dove-Lyon for a few more days, Mrs. Anderson,” he said. “Just until I have done what I can to spike Seward’s guns.”
He frowned as another thought struck him. “I will make sure to sort things out before the end of the week. Mrs. Dove-Lyon is having another of her masked balls, and you will not want to be in residence at that time.”
After that, he carried Grummidge off to the nearest tavern for a well-deserved drink.
Now the immediate danger of incarceration was over, Ben decided to go straight to the duke with his questions about Seward’s possible motives. So, once he arrived home, he settled to writing a letter to the illustrious gentleman.
He franked the letter and gave it to one of his footmen to take to the mail. Kempbury had his seat in Essex, so he would receive the letter on the morrow. Ben could hope to have a response in two or three days, and Mrs. Anderson would be out of the gambling den well before the infamous Mystère Masque.
His satisfaction was somewhat blunted by the knowledge that she would be leaving the luxurious surroundings of the den for those pathetic two rooms in a back alley nearby. But she was an army wife. She was accustomed to difficult circumstances.
And what could he do about it, after all? He barely knew the lady, although he had always admired her courage in adverse circumstances. That said, they had certainly become much better acquainted in the past couple of days. His initial impressions from four years ago had been more than confirmed.
She was brave, yes. She also kept her head in a crisis, was polite to everyone she met, and retained a sense of humor no matter what was happening. She might not be able, on her own, to thwart a lord bent on mischief, but she was able to call allies to her aid.
Admiration was a pale word for how he felt about her now. It didn’t hurt, either, that she was appealingly feminine, though he had been careful to keep his physical response to her hidden. She was, after all, a lady.