Lord John and the Private Matter (Lord John Grey #1)

Lord John and the Private Matter (Lord John Grey #1) Page 27

The butler, a square person of middle age with a stubborn cast to his brow, was stoutly withstanding this preliminary barrage by insisting that his master was not at home, but clearly the man had no notion of the true nature of the forces ranged against him.

“I am Stephan, Landgrave von Erdberg,” von Namtzen announced haughtily, drawing himself up to his full height—which Grey estimated as roughly seven feet, including feathers. “I will come in.”

He promptly did so, bending his neck only sufficiently to prevent the obliteration of his helmet. The butler fell back, sputtering and waving his hands in agitated protest. Grey nodded coolly to the man as he passed, and managed to uphold the dignity of His Majesty’s army by navigating the length of the entry hall without support. Reaching the morning room, he made for the first seat in evidence, and managed to sit down upon it before his legs gave way.

Von Namtzen was lobbing mortar shells into the butler’s position, which appeared to be rapidly crumbling but was still being defended. No, the butler said, now visibly wringing his hands, no, the master was most certainly not at home, and no, nor was the mistress, alas.…

Tom Byrd had followed Grey and was looking round the room in some awe, taking in the set of malachite-topped tables with gold feet, the white damask draperies, and the gigantic paintings in gilded frames that covered every wall.

Grey was sweating heavily from the effort of walking, and the dizziness set his head spinning afresh. He took an iron grip upon his will, though, and stayed upright.

“Tom,” he said, low-voiced, so as not to draw the attention of the embattled butler. “Go and search the house. Come and tell me what—or who—you find.”

Byrd gave him a suspicious look, obviously thinking this a device to get rid of him so that Grey could die surreptitiously—but Grey stayed rigidly upright, jaw set tight, and after a moment, the boy nodded and slipped quietly out, unnoticed by the fulminating butler.

Grey let out a deep breath, and closed his eyes, holding tight to his knees until the spinning sensation eased. It seemed to last a shorter time now; only a few moments, and he could open his eyes again.

Von Namtzen in the meantime appeared to have vanquished the butler, and was now demanding in stentorian tones the immediate assembly of the entire household. He cast a glance over his shoulder at Grey, and interrupted his tirade for an instant.

“Oh—and you will bring me the whites of three eggs, please, in a cup.”

“Bitte?” said the butler, faintly.

“Eggs. You are deaf?” von Namtzen inquired, in biting tones. “Only the whites. Schnell!”

Stung at this public solicitude for his weakened condition, Grey forced himself to his feet, coming to stand beside the Hanoverian, who—with the butler in full rout—had now removed his helmet and was looking quite pleased with himself.

“You are better now, Major?” he inquired, dabbing sweat delicately from his hairline with a linen handkerchief.

“Much, I thank you. I take it that both Reinhardt Mayrhofer and his wife are out?” Reinhardt, he reflected, was almost certainly out. But the wife—

“So the butler says. If he is not out, he is a coward,” von Namtzen said with satisfaction, putting away his handkerchief. “I will root him out of his hiding place like a turnip, though, and then—what will you do, then?” he inquired.

“Probably nothing,” Grey said. “I believe him to be dead. Is that the gentleman in question, by chance?” He nodded at a small framed portrait on a table by the window, its frame set with pearls.

“Yes, that is Mayrhofer and his wife, Maria. They are cousins,” he added, unnecessarily, in view of the close resemblance of the two faces in the portrait.

While both had a delicacy of feature, with long necks and rounded chins, Reinhardt was possessed of an imposing nose and an aristocratic scowl. Maria was a lovely woman, though, Grey thought; she was wigged in the portrait, of course, but had the same warm skin tones and brown eyes as her husband, and so was also likely dark-haired.

“Reinhardt is dead?” von Namtzen asked with interest, looking at the portrait. “How did he die?”

“Shot,” Grey replied briefly. “Quite possibly by the gentleman who poisoned me.”

“What a very industrious sort of fellow.” Von Namtzen’s attention was distracted at this point by the entrance of a parlor maid, white-faced with nerves and clutching a small dish containing the requested egg whites. She glanced from one man to the other, then held out the dish timidly toward von Namtzen.

“Danke,” he said. He handed the dish to Grey, then proceeded at once to catechize the maid, bending toward her in a way that made her press herself against the nearest wall, terrorized into speechlessness and capable only of shaking her head yes and no.

Unable to follow the nuances of this one-sided conversation, Grey turned away, viewing the contents of his dish with distaste. The sound of footsteps in the corridor and agitated voices indicated that the butler was indeed assembling the household, as ordered. Depositing the dish behind an alabaster vase on the desk, he stepped out into the corridor, to find a small crowd of household servants milling about, all chattering in excited German.

At sight of him, they stopped abruptly and stared, with a mixture of curiosity, suspicion, and what looked like simple fright on some faces. Why? he wondered. Was it the uniform?

“Guten Tag,” he said, smiling pleasantly. “Are any of you English?”

There were shifty glances to and fro, the focus of which seemed to be a pair of young chambermaids. He smiled reassuringly at them, beckoning them to one side. They looked at him wide-eyed, like a pair of young deer confronted by a hunter, but a glance at von Namtzen, emerging from the morning room behind him, hastily decided them that Lord John was the lesser of the evils on offer, and they followed close on his heels back into the room, leaving von Namtzen to deal with the crowd in the entry hall.

Their names, the girls admitted, with much stammering and blushing, were Annie and Tab. They were both from Cheapside, bosom friends, and had been in the employ of Herr Mayrhofer for the last three months.

“I gather that Herr Mayrhofer is not, in fact, at home today,” Grey said, still smiling. “When did he go out?”

The girls glanced at each other in confusion.

“Yesterday?” Grey suggested. “This morning?”

“Oh, no, sir,” Annie said. She seemed a trifle the braver of the two, though she could not bring herself to meet his eyes for more than a fraction of a second. “The master’s been g-gone since Tuesday.”

And Magruder’s men had discovered the corpse on Wednesday morning.

“Ah, I see. Do you know where he went?”

Naturally, they did not. They did, however, say—after much shuffling and contradicting of each other—that Herr Mayrhofer was often given to short journeys, leaving home for several days at a time, two or three times a month.

“Indeed,” Grey said. “And what is Herr Mayrhofer’s business, pray?”

Baffled looks, followed by shrugs. Herr Mayrhofer had money, plainly; where it came from was no concern of theirs. Grey felt a growing metallic taste at the back of his tongue, and swallowed, trying to force it down.

“Well, then. When he left the house this time, did he go out in the morning? Or later in the day?”

The girls frowned and conferred with each other in murmurs, before deciding that, well, in fact, they had neither of them actually seen Herr Reinhardt leave the house, and no, they had not heard the carriage draw up, but—

“He must have done, though, Annie,” Tab said, sufficiently engrossed in the argument as to lose some of her timidity. “ ’Coz he wasn’t in his bedroom in the afternoon, was he? Herr Reinhardt likes to have a bit of a sleep in the afternoon,” she explained, turning to Grey. “I turns down the bed right after lunch, and I did it that day—but it wasn’t mussed when I went up after teatime. So he must have gone in the morning, then, mustn’t he?”

The questioning proceeded in this tedious fashion for some time, but Grey succeeded in eliciting only a few helpful pieces of information, most of these negative in nature.

No, they did not think their mistress owned a green velvet gown, though of course she might have ordered one made; her personal maid would know. No, the mistress really wasn’t at home today, or at least they didn’t think so. No, they did not know for sure when she had left the house—but yes, she was here yesterday, and last night, yes. Had she been in the house on Tuesday last? They thought so, but could not really remember.

“Has a gentleman by the name of Joseph Trevelyan ever visited the house?” he asked. The girls exchanged shrugs and looked at him, baffled. How would they know? Their work was all abovestairs; they would seldom see any visitors to the house, save those who stayed overnight.

“Your mistress—you say that she was at home last night. When is the last time you saw her?”

The girls frowned, as one. Annie glanced at Tab; Tab made a small moue of puzzlement at Annie. Both shrugged.

“Well … I don’t rightly know, my lord,” Annie said. “She’s been poorly, the mistress. She’s been a-staying in her room all day, with trays brought up. I go in to change the linens regular, to be sure, but she’d be in her boudoir, or the privy closet. I suppose I haven’t seen her proper since—well, maybe since … Monday?” She raised her brows at Tab, who shrugged.

“Poorly,” Grey repeated. “She was ill?”

“Yes, sir,” Tab said, taking heart from having an actual piece of information to impart. “The doctor came, and all.”

He inquired further, but to no avail. Neither, it seemed, had actually seen the doctor, nor heard anything regarding their mistress’s ailment; they had only heard of it from Cook … or was it from Ilse, the mistress’s lady’s maid?

Abandoning this line of questioning, Grey was inspired by the mention of gossip to inquire further about their master.

“You would not know this from personal experience, of course,” he said, altering his smile to one of courteous apology, “but perhaps Herr Mayrhofer’s valet might have let something drop.… I am wondering whether your master has any particular marks or oddities? Upon his body, I mean.”

Both girls’ faces went completely blank, and then suffused with blood, so rapidly that they were transformed within seconds into a pair of tomatoes, ripe to bursting point. They exchanged brief glances, and Annie let out a high-pitched squeak that might have been a strangled giggle.

He hardly needed further confirmation at this point, but the girls—with many stifled half-shrieks and muffling of their mouths with their hands—did eventually confess that, well, yes, the valet, Herr Waldemar, had explained to Hilde the parlor maid exactly why he required so much shaving soap.…

He dismissed the girls, who went out giggling, and sank down for a moment’s respite on the brocaded chair by the desk, resting his head on his folded arms as he waited for his heart to cease pounding quite so hard.

So, the identity of the corpse was established, at least. And a connexion of some sort between Reinhardt Mayrhofer, the brothel in Meacham Street—and Joseph Trevelyan. But that connexion rested solely on a whore’s word, and on his own identification of the green velvet gown, he reminded himself.

What if Nessie was wrong, and the man who left the brothel dressed in green was not Trevelyan? But it was, he reminded himself. Richard Caswell had admitted it. And now a rich Austrian had turned up dead, dressed in what certainly appeared to be the same green gown worn by Magda, the madam of Meacham Street—which was in turn presumably the same gown worn by Trevelyan. And Mayrhofer was an Austrian who left his home on frequent mysterious journeys.

Grey was reasonably sure that he had discovered Mr. Bowles’s unknown shark. And if Reinhardt Mayrhofer was indeed a spymaster … then the solution to the death of Tim O’Connell most likely lay in the black realm of statecraft and treachery, rather than the blood-red one of lust and revenge.

But the Scanlons were gone, he reminded himself. And what part, in the name of God, did Joseph Trevelyan play in all this?

His heart was slowing again; he swallowed the metallic taste in his mouth and raised his head, to find himself looking at what he had half-seen but not consciously registered before: a large painting that hung above the desk, erotic in nature, mediocre in craftsmanship—and with the initials “RM” worked cunningly into a bunch of flowers in the corner.

He rose, wiping sweaty palms on the skirt of his coat, and glanced quickly round the room. There were two more of the same nature, indisputably by the same hand as the paintings that decorated Magda’s boudoir. All signed “RM.”

It was additional evidence of Mayrhofer’s connexions, were any needed. But it caused him also to wonder afresh about Trevelyan. He had only Caswell’s word for it that Trevelyan’s inamorata was a woman—otherwise, he would be sure that the Cornishman’s rendezvous were kept with Mayrhofer … for whatever purpose.

“And the day you trust Dickie Caswell’s word about anything, you foolish sod …” he muttered, pushing himself up from the chair. On his way out the door, he spotted the dish of congealing egg whites, and took a moment to thrust it hastily into the drawer of the desk.

Von Namtzen had herded the rest of the servants into the library for further inquisition. Hearing Grey come in, he turned to greet him.

“They are both gone, certainly. He, some days ago, she, sometime in the night—no one saw. Or so these servants say.” Here he turned to bend a hard eye on the butler, who flinched.