Chapter 7 The Salon #2
Mrs. Drummond had left them. Georgiana tracked her through the doorway as Mrs. Cavanagh moved from Clementi to Cramer with the determination of a woman ascending a staircase she intended to climb to the top.
Mrs. Drummond crossed the back drawing room, paused to speak with a servant, and continued to a door Georgiana had not previously noticed — a door set into the panelling near the far wall, between the windows, its frame painted to match the surrounding wood. A door designed not to be seen.
Mrs. Drummond opened it, stepped through, and closed it behind her.
Georgiana counted sixty seconds. Mrs. Cavanagh had progressed to Dussek. The back drawing room contained four people — Colonel Warren and his companion, now seated, and two women Georgiana did not know, examining a portfolio of prints on the sofa table. None of them faced the panelled door.
“Will you forgive me, Mrs. Cavanagh? I believe I left my gloves at the pianoforte.”
“Of course, my dear. Do come back — I have not yet told you about the concert at Leipzig.”
Georgiana crossed the back drawing room.
She did not go to the pianoforte. She went to the wall nearest the panelled door and stopped at the print table, positioning herself between the sofa and the wall as though examining the portfolio from a different angle.
The reticule was in her hands. She opened it, found the hearing tube by touch, extended it with a quarter-turn that Mr. Gardiner had demonstrated on Monday afternoon, and held the bell against the panelling, cupping her other hand around the earpiece with the posture of a woman adjusting a piece of jewellery at her throat.
The wall was thin. The plaster conducted sound with a clarity that surprised her — or would have surprised her, had she permitted surprise to reach her expression, which she did not. She pressed the bell flat and listened.
Two voices. One was Mrs. Drummond’s, recognisable from the particular cadence she employed when not performing for her guests — lower, faster, stripped of the decorative warmth that animated her public conversation.
She was speaking French. The French was fluent, rapid, and accented with the precision of a woman who had learned the language not from a governess but from a native speaker over a period of years.
The second voice was a man’s. He spoke from the other side of the room — behind a screen or a curtain, the sound slightly muffled, as though filtered through fabric.
His French was also fluent, but differently accented.
Not English-accented French. Not Parisian.
Something in between — the French of a man who had spoken both languages from childhood and had allowed them to contaminate each other, the consonants English, the vowels French, the rhythm belonging to neither and both.
Georgiana listened. The hearing tube amplified the voices to a volume that was, in the quiet corner of the back drawing room, almost conversational. She held herself still, her breathing shallow, her eyes fixed on the print portfolio as though studying a particularly engrossing landscape.
“—the Brest squadron will not sail before March,” Mrs. Drummond said. “The refitting has been delayed. Prideaux confirmed it this evening — the First Lord expects no movement until the equinox.”
The man’s reply was partly obscured. Georgiana caught fragments: “—sufficient. The coastal positions — adjusted accordingly — the window narrows —”
Mrs. Drummond again, clearer: “The funds have been placed as directed. Twelve hundred through the Rotterdam channel, four hundred through Lisbon. The Lisbon route is slower but the intermediary is reliable.”
“And the Portsmouth matter?”
“Closed. Ellsworth is dead. Gravière is gone — I presume captured, though I have no confirmation. The Darcy woman saw to both.”
“She has been thorough.”
“She has been dangerous. The question is whether she can be neutralised without drawing further attention. The husband is manageable — remove her, and he retreats to Derbyshire. But while she operates, the network is exposed.”
The man’s voice dropped lower. Georgiana pressed the tube harder against the wall. The words arrived in pieces, interrupted by the sounds of the drawing room behind her — a burst of laughter from Colonel Warren’s group, the clatter of the supper tray being carried upstairs.
“—cannot risk another direct approach. The old Meryton channel — still viable — the connections through Kent are intact, but the primary route must shift to —”
“I understand. The new arrangements through the dockyard contacts — Prideaux will handle the Admiralty end. Stanhope has been informed.”
A pause. Then the man spoke again, and this time his voice was clearer, as though he had moved toward the wall, or the screen had shifted.
“The Darcy girl. She was here tonight?”
“Playing the pianoforte. Haydn. Lady Mercer recommended her.”
“How old?”
“Eighteen. Perhaps nineteen. A pretty thing. Musical. No political connexion that I can see.”
“Her brother is Darcy. Her sister-in-law is the woman who broke the Fordyce cipher and intercepted the Admiral’s wine. There is no such thing as a Darcy without a political connexion.”
Another pause. When Mrs. Drummond spoke again, her tone had changed — tighter, more deliberate, the voice of a woman receiving an instruction she did not enjoy.
“You want me to watch her.”
“I want you to determine why she is here. Lady Mercer’s recommendation may be genuine. It may not. The timing is — suggestive.”
“And if it is not genuine?”
“Then she leaves this house tonight, and she does not return, and you inform me by the morning’s post.”
The conversation shifted. The voices lowered further, and Georgiana caught only scattered words — “February,” “convoy routes,” a string of numbers that might have been coordinates.
She committed them to memory the way she committed a musical passage: by rhythm, by pattern, by the relationship between the elements rather than the elements themselves.
Four digits. A pause. Three digits. A pause.
Two sets of two digits. A latitude and a longitude, perhaps.
She did not attempt to interpret them. She stored them.
A chair scraped in the hidden room. Footsteps. Someone was approaching the door.
Georgiana collapsed the hearing tube in a single motion, dropped it into the reticule, and turned from the wall.
She was three steps from the print table and four from the pianoforte.
She chose the pianoforte. She sat, opened the fallboard, and began the opening bars of a Mozart sonata — K.
330, first movement, a piece she could play from the opening note to the final cadence without consulting either the score or her conscious mind.
Her fingers found the keys with the automatic precision of twelve years’ training, and the music rose into the room with the cheerful innocence of a composition written for pleasure and played, on this evening, as a shield.
The panelled door opened behind her. She did not turn.
She played. In the reflection of the lacquered music stand, she saw Mrs. Drummond emerge, alone, and close the door quietly, as she must have done many times before.
Mrs. Drummond smoothed her skirts, adjusted an earring, and returned to the front drawing room.
The transformation was complete in five seconds.
The woman who entered the drawing room bore no resemblance to the woman who had been speaking rapid French about fund transfers and coastal positions thirty seconds earlier.
She was, once again, the charming hostess whose Thursday evenings were the most sought-after invitation in Mayfair.
The man did not emerge. Whoever he was, whatever door or staircase or passage connected the hidden room to the rest of the house, he departed by a route Georgiana could not see.
She finished the Mozart. More applause. Mrs. Cavanagh reappeared to continue her account of Leipzig.
Georgiana smiled, listened, and drank a cup of tea she did not taste, and at twenty past ten she requested her carriage and made her farewells with the mild regret of a young woman who had enjoyed herself and wished the evening could continue.
Mrs. Drummond pressed her hand at the door.
“You must come again, Miss Darcy. Next Thursday. I insist.”
“I should like that very much, Mrs. Drummond.”
“Bring something French next time. Rameau, perhaps. My guests have a taste for the Continental.”
Georgiana descended the steps. The linkboy raised his torch.
The carriage — the Darcy carriage, not Lady Mercer’s, summoned by Briggs through an arrangement Georgiana did not fully understand — waited at the kerb.
She climbed in, closed the door, and sat in the dark as the wheels began to move over the cobbles of Hill Street.
She took a breath. Then another. Her hands, which had been steady on the keys and steady on the hearing tube and steady on the teacup, began to shake.
She pressed them flat against her knees and held them there until the tremor passed, which took the length of Hill Street and the turn onto Berkeley Square.
By the time the carriage reached Piccadilly, her hands were still and her breathing was even and the fear that had been waiting behind the composure, held at bay by training and will and the simple requirement of having something to do, had subsided to a low hum she could manage.
She drew a pencil from the reticule — packed beside the hearing tube, prepared for this — and a folded sheet of paper, and she began to write.
The carriage swayed. The pencil moved. The words came in the order she had stored them, transcribed from memory with the fidelity of a woman who had spent her life converting sound into notation.
Elizabeth was sitting up in bed when Georgiana arrived at Gracechurch Street.