His mother had been brave to keep trying. It was amazing that women consented to take the risk upon themselves, he thought grimly. Not that they always had a choice, of course, but he selfishly hoped Dora wouldn’t become with child– at least not for a long while. He wished his sister too had some years free of childbearing after her wedding, and the best doctors when she did. Perhaps he should have a word with her about preventatives and bodily rhythms before she married? He didn’t think their mother would want to broach such an intimate subject, but it was a travesty that many married women of the upper classes were kept so ignorant of life and death matters. How many of them might look forward to longer and fitter lives if they could space out their pregnancies to suit their health?
He was tying his cravat when a footman knocked on the door.
‘This came for you, sir.’ He held out a tray on which sat a letter with a London postmark.
‘Thank you.’ Jacob secured the neckerchief with a tie pin and took the letter. He recognised Alex Smith’s handwriting. Alex had left the army under a cloud after he was revealed to have entrusted secret military plans to the wrong people in the Hellfire Club. He was lucky to escape without a court martial. Believing he deserved a second chance, Dora and Jacob had taken him on and he was proving a valuable asset.
‘Do you wish me to send up Mr Abbey?’ That was his eldest brother’s valet. Jacob had always disliked the man for his fussy ways.
‘No, thank you. Tell me, what do you think of this knot?’
Surprised to be asked, the footman smiled in delight before schooling his features. ‘Is that a mail coach knot?’
‘Correct.’
‘It looks very well, sir.’
‘Your name?’
‘Tom Moor, sir.’
‘Well, Tom, I’ll ring for you if I need assistance. If that is agreeable to you?’
‘Oh, yes, sir!’
Pleased to have cheered at least one person’s day in this household, Jacob dismissed him and turned to his letter. Alex had sent a report of the last week’s dealings at their agency, the letter having followed Jacob from Kendal where he’d left word for correspondence to go to Levens. The spice case had been settled– the cargo theft traced to a customs officer whose brother was a chef in a London hotel. Both brothers had been detained. Alex went on to report the activities of the other three employees. Goliath Renfrew, known as Ren, a performer in the midget line, and Susan Napper, an actress in her mature years, had found a runaway son in a gambling hell but not before he’d run up an eye-watering debt. He had been turned back over to his furious papa. As a minor, it was unlikely the debts were legal, but the issue of honour might see the family settling them in any case. Hugo Ingles, another of their actor recruits, his speciality being the rotund characters such as Falstaff and Sir Toby, was still watching a young wife suspected of adultery but, so far, she had only shown a fascination with her modiste. Unless that was an amorous liaison of the sapphic kind, that suspicious elderly husband was likely to find his answer delivered in a new wardrobe for the lady and a bill for him.
The last paragraph raised a case of quite a different sort. The family of a Cockermouth magistrate found murdered at Billingsgate had asked them to investigate the perverse circumstances as the Bow Street Runners were falling back on the ‘wrong place at the wrong time’ explanation. Alex wrote:
I was called to the scene by a friend in the River Police. Sir Richard Leyburn had no known reason for being at the fish market that night. His wife said he had gone to his club in St James. She had been at a society event with her daughter and returned late. She retired to her own bedroom without calling in on her husband, assuming he would be asleep, so she was unaware that he was missing until the runners arrived at her door. The manner of his death is bizarre– first struck down from behind, strangled, then the curved part of a shepherd’s crook rammed into his throat. As a final flourish, he was dumped into the river but fastened to the bank by a rope. One concludes from that that the murderer intended for him to be found, but not immediately. Likely he wanted to escape under the cover of darkness but expected dawn would bring his crime to light. It sounds to me like the act of a person with a deep personal grudge, but someone that Leyburn might know well enough to meet in such a strange venue. Alternatively, perhaps there is something symbolic about the crook and it was the act of a political extremist that attacked him for what he was– a magistrate– rather than who he was in private life. Even though it is August, and most cabinet ministers have retired to the country, I can report that anti-government sentiment in Town is still running high in radical circles, enflamed rather than sobered by the assassination of Perceval.
I have told Lady Leyburn that I will do my best to find the killer, but I thought that you, being in the region, might be able to discover if he had any enemies in Cockermouth who conceivably followed him to London.
Cockermouth was fifty miles from Levens, thought Jacob, folding the letter. It lay the other end of the Lakes and would take the best part of a day to ride there. Still, it was true he and Dora were better placed to ask questions than Alex. He would write to say that they would do what they could to aid the investigation.
A shepherd’s crook, though. What a strange object to take to a fish market. A common enough implement in rural areas, you would turn heads parading through London with one unless you were driving sheep to Smithfield. Someone somewhere would’ve noticed. If he were in town, that would be the thread he would start pulling. Should he instruct Alex to do so?
The dinner bell rang downstairs.
He shook his head at himself. Alex was no fool. He would think of this himself. If this agency was going to work, Jacob and Dora needed to trust their people and not try to manage their every move.
Tucking the letter into his travelling bags, he turned to go down to dinner.
But he might in his next missive ask, oh so casually, if anything came of the crook angle. Yes, that would be reasonable.
ChapterSeven
Windermere
Much to her chagrin, Mr Barton insisted on escorting Dora back to her cottage.
‘You really need not take the trouble,’ she argued.
‘No trouble at all!’ he declared. ‘I can sail us to Waterhead and we can walk from there. It won’t save much time, but it will give us a respite from tramping back up the hill.’
Resigning herself to his company, Dora watched him ready his little sailing boat for the journey. He was amusingly enthusiastic, checking a list he drew from his pocket to get the steps right. It did seem an awful lot of trouble when her own two feet could already have taken her a fair way home. When he noticed her watching, he said sheepishly:
‘It’s a new boat– bought this season.’
