Death and the Courtesan (11 page)

“Here you are at last, my dears!” cried Arabella, pretending to be glad.

Edwardina made her a fine little curtsy, but the churlish Neddy merely fixed her with a pink-rimmed, sullen glare.

“Neddy’s sulking,” said his mother. “Pay no attention to him.”

Polly was a hardworking, somewhat hard-boiled young courtesan, who had little patience with her whining son, while Sarah-Jane, Eddie’s mother, had nothing but goose down where her brains should have been.

“What have you there, Neddy?” asked Arabella. “May I see?”

The child continued to glower, without answering, so she removed the lid herself, and they both peered in at the contents.

“Oh! What lovely turtles! What have you named them?”

“Klunk and Stupid Looking. That turtle is Klunk and that turtle is Stupid Looking,” said Neddy, pointing.

Why was it that children generally took so long to master the pronoun?

“Klunk?” said Belinda, wrinkling her nose. “That’s a funny name! Whatever does it mean?”

“Doesn’t mean anything,” the boy replied, sticking out his lower lip. “That’s the sound he makes when I kick him downstairs!”

“You mustn’t do that, Neddy,” said Belinda seriously. “It’s cruel, and you could break his shell that way.”

“Good!”

“Why have you given these wonderful creatures such hateful names?” asked Arabella.

“Because,” the child replied, raising his voice, “I wanted a
puppy!
”

“As if I hadn’t enough to do without housetraining a puppy!” Polly explained. “I shall observe his interactions with the turtles and review the matter again. But based on what I have seen so far, I very much doubt that we shall be getting a dog.”

She addressed herself chiefly to Belinda, as Arabella had already grown bored with the conversation and seemed scarcely to be listening.

“Polly,” she said, glancing out the window, “did you notice the Bow Street Runners standing guard in front of my house?”

“Yes. They must be a great vexation to you!”

“Oh, not so much. What do
you
think of them, Sarah-Jane?”

“The dark one is awfully handsome!”

“Really? Actually, I had him in mind for Polly. Could you like the fair one?”

Sarah-Jane shrugged. “I prefer my men dark,” she said. “Always have done.”

“What do you say, Polly?”

“I wonder why you are asking these questions,” said Polly crossly. “What you do with your time is your own business, but I want it known here and now that I have no intention of participating in any of your drunken debauches!”

“Heavens! You mistake me!” cried Arabella. “I was just thinking how nice it would be if Neddy and Eddie were to have real fathers.”

For if they had, thought she, their mothers could stay at home and take care of them properly and they wouldn’t always need to be coming out to Lustings. (Arabella sometimes engaged in altruistic schemes, but this was not one of them.)

Once the children were settled in, their mothers left and their aunties took them onto the roof, where the telescope was. The views were splendid from up there, and a little promenade fence round the perimeter kept people from falling off.

Neddy generally tried to spy into other people’s windows, but Eddie always looked down at the roads. Neither child was interested in the heavens.

“What can you see?” asked Belinda of her niece, who was squinting through the eyepiece.

“A coach!” she said excitedly. “It looks like a post chaise, and it is headed this way! It’s simply
crowded
with trunks and things!”

“How do you know it’s a post chaise?” Neddy sneered. “You couldn’t possibly read the door from this far away. It’s probably a private carriage!”

“I said it
looks
like one,” said Edwardina. “It’s yellow, it’s got luggage on top, and it’s going very fast. Besides, why should anyone with a private carriage want to paint it to
look
like a post chaise?”

Eddie had promised her mother not to squabble with Neddy, but why did he always have to be so disagreeable?

“Here,” he said, suddenly shoving her out of the way. “Let
me
look!”

“Ow!”
she cried, for Neddy had knocked her against the telescope, nearly upsetting it, and injuring her elbow.

Arabella would not stand for this. She pushed her nephew suddenly in the chest, propelling him violently backward.

“No,” she said. “
I
am going to look, because it’s
my
telescope, and I think that coach has my uncle inside it! You see?” she said to Neddy, who was rubbing his chest and looking aggrieved. “It hurts to be pushed around like a sack of turnips, doesn’t it? Well-bred young ladies and gentlemen do not push one another; they wait their turn, like civilized persons.”

“You
pushed
me,
” he remarked rudely.

“Yes. Sometimes it is more effective to demonstrate a lesson than merely to talk about it. And I suspect you to be the type of child who learns best by doing, or, in this case, by being done to.”

Belinda had taken advantage of the impromptu lesson to snatch a look through the telescope herself. “It
is
Uncle Selwyn,” she pronounced, with satisfaction. “Let us go down and wait for him in the porte cochere!”

Arabella’s porte cochere was a dual-purpose structure. It was both a shelter where carriages could load and unload during inclement weather and a wonderful place to have tea. The roof was supported by eight Corinthian columns of Portland stone, with marble caryatids arranged between them. A table with collapsible legs and a set of folding chairs could be lowered from the ceiling at a moment’s notice and set up to accommodate six persons.

The post chaise, for that is indeed what it was—Eddie stuck out her tongue at Neddy when no one was looking—pulled up easily beneath the loaded ceiling with room to spare and discharged its distinguished passenger.

The last time Arabella had seen him, Sir Geoffrey Selwyn had been an imposing, corpulent man, with a big, florid face. Now he was grown alarmingly spare and his complexion was a sickly gray. As Arabella’s grooms came out to unload the equipage, His Lordship handed one of them a mysterious-looking dome-shaped parcel, swathed in Indian calico, which he had been nursing on his lap.

“Mind you be careful of that,” he said. “It is Miss Belinda’s birthday present!”

But as Trotter was taking hold of the object, a malevolent voice thundered out of it, and the coachman nearly dropped it in surprise. The sudden jolt apparently occasioned a stream of obscenities from within, articulated in a particularly nasty, insulting tone, and its hearers were thrilled with a kind of delighted horror.

“What have you there, Uncle? A Pygmy?” asked Arabella.

But Belinda knew what it was. “Oh!” she cried, her eyes sparkling with joy. “It’s a parrot!”

When Sir Geoffrey’s gear had been unloaded and carried off to the house, Arabella had the table and chairs brought down from the ceiling of the porte cochere and dismissed the children to play in the stream.

“May we take our shoes and stockings off?” asked Eddie, her eyes nearly popping from her head with unbearable expectation.

“I insist that you do so,” said their aunt. “You will ruin them, otherwise.”

She turned to one of the Runners, who’d been standing a short distance away, trying to look inconspicuous. “Mr. Dysart, would you be so kind as to ask Cook to send us out some lemonade?”

“Good lord!” exclaimed her uncle, after the man had gone. “Was that a policeman?”

Briefly, Arabella outlined her situation.

“How dreadful for you, my dear!”

“I am attempting to solve the case on my own, Uncle,” she said. “So if I must leave you to your own devices much of the time, I hope that you will forgive me.”

“Of course you must do whatever is necessary to clear your name,” said Sir Geoffrey, patting the hand of his other niece. “After all, I shall have your pretty sister here to keep me company.”

“I may not be around much, either,” said Belinda apologetically.

“Our Bunny has become the favorite of the Princess of Wales,” said Arabella. “And is apt to be summoned to the royal presence at all hours.”

Uncle Selwyn was astonished. “The Princess of Wales? Why . . . I . . . How amazing!”

“It is not what you think,” said Belinda. “I haven’t been miraculously restored to polite society or anything.”

Arabella nodded. “You have been away many years, Uncle Selwyn. You probably don’t know about the princess.”

“She’s half-mad,” Belinda explained, “and goes about dressed in the most peculiar fashion—put a scooped-out melon on her head, once; said it made a very cool sort of hat. She frequently appears at fancy dress parties naked to the waist, claiming to be Venus, or Lady Godiva. She likes to be shocking. The prince regent keeps trying to divorce her, but the princess has very good lawyers. And, anyway, Parliament won’t allow it.”

“Upon my word!”

“The world is changing,” said Arabella. “Or at least, society is.”

“Yes. As you say,” said Sir Geoffrey, “I have been away much too long. Got no connections here anymore, except for you two and Charles. And what with my own sweet Sophia gone from me now . . .” Here the dear old fellow pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and applied it to his eye corners. “I thought, you know . . .”

“Of course,” said Arabella. “We welcome you with open arms, Uncle. My sister and I very much hope that you will decide to come live with us.”

“Well!” he exclaimed. “That is very kind, and I am most obliged to you, but the fact is . . . that is, I . . . Oh, dash it all! Why should I hide the truth from
you?
I left my heart behind in England when I went off to Ceylon with your aunt, and the lady is a widow now. We’ve been . . . writing to one another for almost a year, and it is settled that I shall go and stay with her, until . . . well, until my health breaks down. I won’t go into detail, but I am not long for this world.”

Arabella patted him sympathetically on the shoulder. His news had not shocked her, for she had seen death in his face the moment he alighted from the carriage.

“Miranda—that is, Mrs. Ironmonger—and I plan to marry at once.”

“Ironmonger!”

The cry of delighted disbelief had burst simultaneously from both of the Beaumont throats.

“Yes. It used to be ‘Smith,’ but her late husband had it legally changed, at her urging.”

“Why?” asked Arabella. “Did she think ‘Ironmonger’ sounded more genteel?”

“No. It wasn’t that way at all. Miranda . . . the lady . . . my friend used to get the queerest looks whenever she had to say or sign the name ‘Smith’ in any place where she was not known by sight. People thought she must be hiding some shameful secret, and giving a false name, as her real one should be instantly recognized. That never happens now, with ‘Ironmonger. ’ ”

“Well! This is splendid!” said Arabella.

“I think it’s terribly sad!” sniffed Belinda, whose eyes had begun to leak.

“Yes, it’s that, too,” Arabella agreed. “Uncle Selwyn, I am so happy for you, and sorry for you, and sorry for us, that we shall be losing you so soon . . . but modern medicine has made great strides in the past ten years. You have not yet been to see a London specialist. Perhaps you are not so ill as you think.”

He shook his head. “There is no hope, I have already looked into it. But I am old, you know, and quite resigned to it. As for Mrs. Ironmonger, she is nearly my age, and not very well herself. If I die first, I shall leave her comfortably well off, with the remainder of my estate going to you two and Charles. Mrs. Ironmonger has no family of her own, so she will leave everything to you, as well.”

“All right, but for heaven’s sake, do not breathe a word of this to Charles! He will come swooping in, demanding an advance on his inheritance, and then, given time, will bleed you both dry.”

“Hm. Still addicted to gaming, is he?”

“That, and other things.”

“Well, I shall certainly take steps to ensure Mrs. Ironmonger’s financial safety. And also,” he said, smiling and patting her arm, “yours and Belinda’s.”

When Mrs. Janks appeared with refreshments, Sir Geoffrey sent for the calico dome, observing with a practiced and appreciative eye the housekeeper’s ample backside as it retreated across the lawn.

“We need to unwrap his cage as soon as possible,” explained Sir Geoffrey. “Otherwise he becomes sullen. Goes off his food . . . won’t do anything but swear, and I do want him to make a good first impression.”

The dome was brought and placed before Belinda to unwrap. For some time past, she had wanted a parrot, the real talking kind, with brilliant feathers of gold and green and purple. So when she removed the cloth and saw only a bright-eyed black bird, with an orange beak and yellow ear lappets, she was visibly disappointed.

“This is Mephistopheles,” said her uncle. “I’ve taken to calling him ‘Fisto,’ for short. What do you think of him?”

“He’s very nice,” said Belinda politely. “But I thought he was a parrot.”

“Oh, a mynah bird is much
better
than a parrot, my dear. A parrot can only squawk in a harsh voice, and say a few very limited things. Watch this.”

When the fresh air and sunshine touched him, Fisto ruffled his neck feathers and shook his head rapidly as if to clear it.

“Ahhh!” said the bird appreciatively. “That’s
much
better!”

“Yes, you’re happy now, aren’t you, Fisto? Hey? This is Belinda. Do you remember what I taught you to say to her? Happy . . .”

“Happy birthday, Belinda, my dear! Many, many happy returns of the day!” said Fisto, in a perfect imitation of Sir Geoffrey’s voice.

Belinda was enchanted.

“He’s very cunning,” said their uncle. “Fisto can repeat anything you say, in your exact
voice
. And listen to this!”