His at Night (17 page)

Yet as he looked at her, he already measured in his mind the proportion of Naples ochre and vermilion that he should add to silver-white to approximate the warm, healthy tone of her skin.

“You said it is for your private collection.”

“That is my intention.”

“So you won’t have it exhibited?”

“So much concern for my modesty.” She smiled teasingly. “Why can’t I display half as much decorum?”

“I need a promise.”

For the most part, he was an easygoing man. But he would not yield on this matter.

“I want it for a record of my youth, so that I may one day look back upon it and sigh over my own lost beauty. I promise you solemnly that not only will I not exhibit it anywhere, I will not even display it in my own house. Instead, it will go into a crate, and not be opened again until I see a hag in the mirror.” She smiled again. “Will that satisfy you?”

He swallowed. “All right then. I’ll do it.”

She set down her teacup and gazed directly at him. “In that case, I find myself quite willing to help you track down the provenance of your mysterious painting.”

Mrs. Watts had been dead a quarter of a century. Vere considered himself quite lucky to locate, in only a few hours, someone who had once known her.

His search took him from Bermondsey to Seven Dials. Barely a mile away from the spacious squares of Mayfair, Seven Dials had been notorious for its crime and poverty earlier in the century. In recent years, the character of the district had improved, although Vere was still disinclined to venture into its side streets alone at night.

But at the moment it was broad daylight. St. Martin’s Lane, which led into the district, was raucous with birds, for it was here that London’s bird fanciers gathered. He passed a shop full of songbirds in cages: bullfinches, larks, and starlings, all nervously twittering and chirping. Another shop brimmed with crates upon crates of plump, cooing pigeons. Hawks and owls and parrots amplified the cacophony. He was grateful to pass an occasional establishment specializing in aquatic creatures or rabbits, both blessedly silent.

Jacob Dooley lived on Little Earl Street, where crowds milled about a lively outdoor market, though Vere could not see much for sale that wasn’t second- or third-hand goods. What use could any woman make of a set of crinoline hoops in this day and age, he did not know, but he saw not one, not two, but three being hawked as “Height o’ fashion!”

Dooley’s flat was on the top floor of a four-story building. The front of the building, grandly lettered, advertised the grocer on the ground floor—
Dairy
Farmer, Family Butcher, Milk Contractor, Large Consumers Supplied
. The narrow, dark staircase inside smelled intermittently of urine.

Vere’s knock summoned a man in his mid-sixties, broad and hirsute, with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and a beard of equally mixed shades. He stood behind his partially open door, warily examining Vere. Vere had changed into costume. He was now a burly drayman with a beard that almost rivaled Dooley’s in luxuriance. His rough work clothes smelled as they ought: equal parts horse and brewery.

“Who are you? And why are you asking after Mrs. Watts?” Dooley’s Irish origin was evident in his speech.

Vere had his answer and his Scouse accent ready. “Mrs. Watts was me dad’s auntie, she was. That’s how me mum told me. Me dad ran away to London to live with Mrs. Watts.”

Dooley’s eyes widened. “But Ned was only a lad when he came to live with her, sure he was. Me, I never saw him at all. But Mag—Mrs. Watts—she said he was fourteen when he came and sixteen when he left.”

“Well, he had me in me mum before he left Liverpool. Least he had me mum fink so.”

Dooley stepped back. “Come in then. I’ll give you a cup of tea.”

The flat consisted of only one room with a thin yellow curtain in the middle to separate the sitting and the sleeping areas. Dooley had a surprisingly heavy-looking table, two chairs, and a homemade set of shelves on which rested neat piles of newspapers and
two large books—one of which looked to be a Bible, the other perhaps a devotional.

Dooley put water from a pitcher and a handful of tea leaves together into a pot and hooked the makeshift kettle over a spirit lamp. “You still have your mum?”

“Lost her December last. She told me before she died about me real dad. I been asking ’bout him since I buried her.”

“You are in luck, lad,” said Dooley, standing by the spirit lamp. “Last I heard of him, himself was a rich man in South Africa. Diamonds.”

Vere stopped breathing for several seconds. He looked at Dooley with eyes full of hope. “You ain’t funning me, are you, Mr. Dooley?”

“No. The last time I saw Maggie—your Mrs. Watts—she was after having a cable from him. He was stinking rich and coming home to make her a grand lady. Mind you, I was happy for her, but I was mighty sorry for myself. I was wanting her to marry me. She had a few years on me but she was a good woman, Maggie Watts, and sang real pretty, sure she did. But she wouldn’t want a poor sailor like me when her nephew was going to build her a grand place in the country and have her presented to the queen, would she?

“I left on a steamer to San Francisco. And when I came back—” Dooley’s jaw tightened. “When I came back she was already in the ground.”

“I’m awful sorry.” Vere did not need to manufacture his sympathy. He knew it all too well, the grief and bewilderment of loss.

Dooley did not answer for a while, but laid out two cups—the unchipped one for Vere—and sliced half a loaf of dark bread. Although the tea leaves had been boiled with the water, the tea Dooley poured was hardly darker than lemonade—like everything else for sale on the street below, the tea leaves too were secondhand.

“Thank you, sir,” said Vere for his tea.

Dooley sat down heavily. “It bothered me all these years how she died—bothers me to this day.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, sir, how
did
she die?”

“The coroner’s report said she died of too much chloral. Fell asleep and never woke up again. I tried to tell the coroner that she never had any such thing about. She was a hardworking woman who slept like the dead at night—you should have heard her snoring. ’Course, it didn’t help me any that I said that, made her sound like a loose woman. The coroner—that fool—said that a woman would put that sort of thing away before she entertained a man in her ‘place of domicile,’ and I should leave the cause of death to men of science.”

“You don’t fink it was chloral?”

Dooley’s face was troubled. “I asked all her neighbors. There were two young girls. They said she was cold—not stone-cold but real cool—and still breathing when they found her. They called for a doctor, but the doctor was a quack and didn’t know anything.”

He left his seat again and retrieved the book Vere had thought a devotional from the shelves. It was in
fact titled
Poisons: Their Effect and Detection—A Manual for the Use of Analytical Chemists and Experts
. Dooley opened the book to a much dog-eared portion. “The way she was sleeping, going colder and colder, that was chloral. And if the doctor was himself a proper doctor, some strychnine could have saved her.”

Strychnine caused otherwise deadly muscular convulsions. Yet it was for precisely that reason it was an antidote to an overdose of chloral, aiding the heart’s function and putting a halt to the dangerous slide of body temperature. A shot of strychnine had been what the physician had administered in the Haysleigh case—for which Vere had needed much help from Lady Kingsley—to successfully save Lady Haysleigh.

“So it was chloral after all?”

“It was. I’d have sworn before a judge she never used any. But the coroner said she had a good thirty grams, even showed me the bottle.” Dooley closed the book, his neck bent. “Maybe I didn’t know her as well as I s’posed.”

“I’m sorry,” Vere said again.

As he took a sip of his hot but largely flavorless tea, he was suddenly reminded of a long dormant case concerning a man named Stephen Delaney. Delaney, too, had died from an overdose of chloral. But as Delaney had not been a poor woman carrying on an affair the coroner found distasteful, but an ascetic man of science—not to mention brother to a bishop—his death had received much more attention from the law when his family had strenuously protested that he had never kept any chloral.

Nothing had come of the investigation. By the time Vere had read the file, seven years ago, it had been thick with a decade of undisturbed dust. And even he had to concede, when he finished his reading, that there was nothing for anyone to go on.

“Here I go again,” said Dooley, “getting caught up talking about my poor Maggie when you wanted to hear about your dad.”

“If he’s me dad, then she was me auntie too—me great-grandauntie.”

“There’s that. There’s that.” Dooley set his thick, calloused hands on the book of poisons. “But I can’t tell you much more.”

“Didn’t you say he was going to come and see her and make her a grand lady?”

“He never did. His secretary came, but he never did.”

Vere had to fight to make himself sound deflated. “His secretary?”

“That’s what Fanny Nobb said. She said a real fine gentleman came to see Maggie a few days before she died. Your dad had to stay behind in Kimberley, in the diamond fields, so he sent his secretary to take care of things in London. The secretary was to look for a fancy house for Maggie and take her to buy everything she wanted. Maybe that was why she needed the chloral—too wound up to sleep.”

Vere’s heart thumped. Instead of the brawler Edmund Douglas, “a real fine gentleman” had come in his stead. And shortly afterward Mrs. Watts had died
of a substance her lover was certain she had never used.

If his suspicions were right, if Douglas had not even come by the diamond mine by his own luck, then in a twisted way, his hunger for success in other arenas of business made sense. He was trying to prove that he did have what it took to thrive without the help of his criminality—except he didn’t.

“Me dad, did he come for Mrs. Watts’s funeral then?” Vere asked.

“Not enough time, was there? She died in July; had to put her underground real fast. But he did wire the money for her funeral expenses, Fanny said.”

“The secretary, he didn’t come to the funeral either?”

“I can’t tell you. I was in San Francisco, drunk as a skunk. Sure I was.” The old man sighed. “I thought about it a few times—looking up your dad and maybe telling him about my Maggie. But I never did. Never helped him any, and didn’t want him to think I was after his money.”

Vere nodded and came to his feet. “Thank you, Mr. Dooley.”

“Sorry I couldn’t tell you more.”

“It was plenty what you did tell me, sir.”

Dooley offered Vere his hand. “Good luck to you, young man.”

Vere shook Dooley’s rough hand, aware that this was where his disguise might fall apart: He didn’t have the hands of a workingman. But Dooley, still in the grips of the past, did not notice.

For Dooley there would never be justice enough: He had already lost the woman he loved. But Vere might yet uncover the whole truth of what had happened to Mrs. Watts.

And that was what he would do.

T
he interior of the church was stone, the architecture Norman Romanesque. A gray, damp light fell from the windows of the clerestory. Here and there the cool gloom of the sanctuary was dispelled by the golden light of fat white candles, held aloft on candelabra as tall as Vere.

Freddie, who had been waiting outside, entered with Mrs. Douglas, helping her into a pew. Lady Kingsley came up to the altar and gave Vere a small nod—she would act the part of the matron of honor.

The church door opened and closed again, accompanied by a draft of humid, nippy air—the arrival of the woman who was to become Lady Vere in short order. Vere swallowed, agitated despite himself—and not merely with righteous indignation.

She was halfway down the aisle when he at last looked in her direction.

She wore the plainest wedding gown he’d ever seen,
unadorned by anything lacy, feathery, or glittery. Her accessories consisted of a bouquet of violets in her hands, a veil covering her hair, and her smile.