Bones of the Buried

Book 2: Lord Edward Corinth & Verity Browne

by David Roberts

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Cozy Mystery; Historical Mysteries; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

A murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne. After six months in New York, Lord Edward returns to London only for his old sparring partner, Verity Browne, to convince him to investigate a murder in Madrid. Her lover, David Griffith-Jones, has been convicted for the murder of a fellow Communist Party member and is set to face a firing squad. Against all odds, Edward clears David's name and heads back to England. Here, Edward discovers another murder, surprisingly connected to the murder back in Spain. And it isn't too long before a third mysterious murder comes to light... Edward and Verity join forces once again in search of the truth. But danger is all around them, and there is no guarantee that justice will be served and the murders avenged... Praise for David Roberts: 'A classic murder mystery [...] and a most engaging pair of amateur sleuths' Charles Osborne, author of The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie 'A gripping, richly satisfying whodunit with finely observed characters, sparkling with insouciance and stinging menace' Peter James 'A really well-crafted and charming mystery story' Daily Mail 'A perfect example of golden-age mystery traditions with the cobwebs swept away' Guardian

Release date: September 1, 2011

Publisher: C & R Crime

Print pages: 320

Sample

‘Boy!’ The call echoed round the house and a scurry of small black-garbed figures raced to answer it, slithering to a halt outside the library. Eight senior boys in
the house constituted ‘the library’ and it was also the name given to the room they used as a common-room. It had almost no books in it – just a broken-backed sofa, several
armchairs, all of which had seen better days, and a table with one leg amputated at the knee, supported uncertainly by a pile of textbooks. There was also a dartboard, a wind-up gramophone with a
spectacular horn, a few records in brown paper sleeves and an ancient kettle. Next to the grate, beside a couple of toasting forks, a bunch of canes rested negligently against the wall, assuming an
air of innocence which belied the very real threat that lay behind their willowy form.

The last in line was, as always, Featherstone, a small boy dressed in bum-freezers. This was the uniform reserved for first-year Etonians below a certain height. The short coat, cut off just
above the posterior, contrasted with the tail coats worn by all the other boys and marked him out as the lowest form of school life. Oliver Featherstone was very miserable. He badly missed his
father who, out of love, had inflicted upon him this particular torture. His father was the owner of several oil wells in Persia but, to Oliver’s great grief, was also the proprietor of a
famous department store on Oxford Street in London. His mother, whom he rarely saw, was a film actress whose photograph appeared in picture-papers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Unfortunately, he had discovered that neither his father’s wealth nor his mother’s celebrity was anything to be proud of at Eton. What was worse, his father’s name was not
really Featherstone but Federstein. There were several Jews at Eton, one of whom was a member of Pop, the select society of popular boys which ran the school, but the Jews whom Eton welcomed, as
Oliver painfully discovered, were the sons of merchant bankers who had bankrolled the government and the monarchy for almost a century. None of these held out to him the hand of friendship. Despite
his wealth, his father had himself been ostracised from polite society and, in a clumsy attempt to ease his son’s passage through the school and protect him from bullying, had tried to
conceal his origins by changing the spelling of his surname. It took only three weeks for it to become known that Featherstone was really Federstein and that his father was ‘a grocer’.
Oliver at once became the innocent victim of his father’s subterfuge.

‘Federstein!’ All the other small boys ran away chirruping gratefully like a swoop of starlings.

‘Yes, Hoden?’ said Oliver, wearily.

Hoden scribbled on a piece of paper, folded it several times and thrust it at him. ‘Take this to Stephen Thayer at Chandler’s, and hurry.’

‘But Hoden, please! I’ve got an essay for tomorrow and I’ve already had three rips. My tutor said it would be PS next time.’

‘Well, you’d better run then,’ said Hoden unsympathetically. When a boy’s work was not up to scratch the master – or beak as he was called at Eton – would
tear it at the top and the errant pupil would have to take it to show his housemaster. Too many rips would result in Penal Servitude – PS for short – which involved sacrificing already
scarce free time on ‘extra work’.

Highly disgruntled, Oliver set off at a run down Judy’s Passage, the narrow pedestrian way which threaded the redbrick buildings, the last of which was Stephen Thayer’s house.
Half-way, he got a stitch in his side and slowed to a walk. There was a large stone, big enough for a small boy to sit on, where the path made a dog-leg and there, strictly against the rules,
Oliver perched and unfolded the note Hoden had given him. It read: ‘Stevie, can you meet me underneath the arches tomorrow after six. Send word by the oily Jewboy, love, M. PS But he is
rather pretty isn’t he?’

Oliver’s eyes began to water. How dare this horrible man call him an oily Jewboy, and pretty. Neither his father nor his mother had told him anything about sex before he went to school.
Had he but known it, his mother was an expert on the subject but, in his eyes, she was as pure as a garden rose and it would have embarrassed him horribly if she had said anything with a view to
preparing him for life in an English public school. As for his father, he assumed that in some magical way his son was to be transformed into an English gentleman, in his view a creature second
only to the gods themselves. He visualised Eton as holy water in which his son would be purified. It was odd that a man so generally shrewd in the affairs of the world should be so naive when it
came to baptism.

Oliver looked at his hand with horror. In his anguish, and without being aware of what he was doing, he had scrumpled up Hoden’s note. He couldn’t deliver it now without Thayer
knowing that he had opened it but he dared not go back without an answer. The tears began to trickle down his cheeks. Half-blinded by the savage grief of childhood, he did not notice that someone
was walking down the passage towards him. It was the very boy to whom he was to deliver the note.

‘What’s up, Featherstone – that is your name, isn’t it? Come now, why are you blubbing?’

He spoke not unkindly and Oliver was persuaded to hold up the crumpled piece of paper for his inspection. ‘I’m . . . I’m truly sorry, Thayer. I didn’t mean to open it. It
just sort of came undone.’

Thayer took the note, read it and blushed deeply. He bit his lip and tried to decide what to say. He knew he could get into bad trouble if the substance of the message came to the attention of
his housemaster, and Hoden would certainly be sacked. Homosexual feelings, though common enough in a single sex school, or indeed because they were so common, were anathema to the authorities and
no housemaster would hesitate to have a boy removed from the school if anything of the kind was proved against him.

Damn Hoden, Thayer thought. He really would have to drop him. ‘Stop all that noise, Featherstone. No one’s going to punish you but really, you know, it was very wrong of you to open
a private note.’

‘Ye . . . s,’ Oliver agreed. ‘Should I say anything to Hoden? He may want to whack me.’

‘No,’ said Thayer hurriedly. ‘Don’t do that. I got the message and no one else saw it. We’ll leave it at that. No harm done.’

‘No . . .? Thank you, sir.’

‘Don’t call me “sir”, you little idiot. You only call beaks “sir”.’

‘Yes, Thayer.’

‘Oh, and don’t get upset about people calling you . . . names. You can’t help being . . . whatever it is he said you were . . . not oily I mean but the other. It’s
nothing to be ashamed of. Now off you go, and remember: say nothing of this to anyone or you will get into trouble.’

‘Yes, Thayer. And thank you,’ said the small boy, managing a smile. Could it be that this god figure, a member of Pop and therefore one of Eton’s elect, was going to forgive
him, to be compassionate? It never occurred to him for a moment that he, the most miserable of worms, had through an accident, through his own clumsiness, gained a measure of power over one so
mighty. He looked at Thayer, noticing him for the first time as a person – his expensively cut hair, his coloured waistcoat, which only members of Pop could wear, gleaming like armour, his
buttonhole freshly cut that morning in his tutor’s garden. From his white ‘stick-up’ collar to his shoes shiny enough to reflect his face, Thayer was perfect and Oliver felt an
overwhelming desire to fall on his knees and worship.

In his second ‘half’ at Eton, Oliver began to enjoy himself. In the way of small boys, he quickly forgot the misery of his first half, though he kept out of Hoden’s way as much
as possible. He even made a few friends and almost anything is bearable with a friend to commiserate with you. And Eton had a lot to offer. He took to the pleasures of the river and would take a
‘whiff’ upriver to Queen’s Eyot, a little island where he could eat sausage and mash, drink the weakest of beer and read. Reading was his chief pleasure. With books he could
escape to . . . to wherever he desired and he did still want to escape. He found too that he was musical and would spend hours in the music school trying to master the piano, with some success.

In fact, sex was the only thing which spoiled Oliver’s life – not his own feelings, which had not yet begun to trouble him, but he was bewildered and distressed by the attention of
some older boys. Hoden, in particular, would summon him to the library and maul him about until he wept, when he would be contemptuously dismissed. One afternoon – this was in the summer half
and the days were long and hot – he happened to be in the house instead of on the river. He had strained a muscle in his leg and had been told not to take out his whiff for a couple of days.
The dreaded cry of ‘boy’ sounded round the virtually empty building and, with a groan, Oliver left his book and ran to answer it. It did not cross his mind that he might safely ignore
the summons. When he arrived, he found he was the only boy to have answered the call and resigned himself to carrying some stupid message to another house or making some lazy senior a cup of
tea.

He knocked on the door and opened it when a hoarse voice shouted, ‘Come!’

He recognised the voice immediately as belonging to Hoden and his heart missed a beat. But, when he was in the room, he saw that Hoden’s friend, Tilney, was also there and his spirits rose
a little. Surely Hoden would not try anything on in this other boy’s presence. But he was wrong.

‘Ah, Federstein.’ Hoden took pleasure in making the name sound as foreign as possible. ‘You’ve come at last. My friend Tilney here doesn’t believe that you can act
but I heard you had a part in the school play – Shakespeare?’

‘Love’s Labour’s Lost, but I’ve only a very small part, Hoden.

‘So I’ve always imagined,’ Hoden sniggered. ‘As a girl, I understand?’

‘Yes,’ said Oliver miserably.

‘Well, Tilney and I want to “hear your lines”. Isn’t that what thespians say?’

‘Oh, I . . . I don’t know them yet.’

‘Well, we’ll assist you.’

‘No, I can’t remember . . .’

‘I think it might help,’ Hoden said, ‘if you took off some of your clothes.’ He pretended to appeal to Tilney who was smirking uneasily at his friend’s teasing.
‘He can’t pretend to be a girl dressed in trousers, now can he, Tilney old man?’

‘I should say not,’ said the other boy as heartily as he could manage.

‘Take off your clothes, Federstein. We want to see if you’re a girl.’

‘No, please, Hoden, let me go, won’t you.’

Oliver was now very frightened. He was not physically brave and he was almost excessively modest. He hated undressing in the bathroom with other boys and one of the things he most appreciated
about Eton was that even ‘new boys’ had separate rooms and did not sleep in dormitories.

‘I won’t, Hoden. Tilney, tell him to leave me alone.’

‘Oh, let the little sod go,’ Tilney said lazily, but Hoden now had the taste of blood.

‘No, Tilney, this little Jewboy has to be taught a lesson. Here, help me take his trousers off so I can whack him.’

Reluctantly, Tilney got up from the sofa and seized hold of the wriggling boy as Hoden removed first his ‘bum-freezer’ jacket, and then his shirt. By this time Oliver was in tears
and, as Hoden began to tug frantically at the boy’s trousers, Tilney said, ‘I say, I think we ought to let the little tyke go.’

‘No fear,’ said Hoden, picking up a cane from the pile in the corner and striking at Oliver’s back. ‘Stand still, you malodorous animal, if you don’t want to get
badly hurt,’ he ordered, waving the cane over his head as if he were trying to swat a fly. Then he screamed. A lucky kick from Oliver’s flying heels had caught him on the shin.
‘That does it, Tilney, I’m going to show the little Jew what for.’

He raised the cane above his shoulder but, before he could strike, the library door opened and Stephen Thayer entered. He took in the scene at a glance. He strode over to Hoden and tore the cane
from his grasp. Without a word he swung it hard against Hoden’s cheek, raising a red weal as thick as the bamboo. Hoden screamed again and let go of Oliver who gathered up his clothes and
fled.

Oliver’s awe of Thayer was transformed in a moment to love. When several days later he met him as they were both taking boats off the racks, he tried to say something of what he felt.

‘Oh, Thayer, I wanted to thank you . . . but why are you going on the river? I thought you were a drybob.’

‘I am, but I like to scull when I have the time. And please – don’t thank me. I’ve told Hoden and Tilney if they ever come near you again I will have them sacked. I
don’t think they will try anything like that again but if they do – tell me.’

‘Oh, Thayer, thank you. I suppose there’s nothing I can do for you, is there?’

‘No, certainly not . . . though wait a minute.’ He pretended an idea had just struck him. ‘Isn’t your mater the film star, Dora Pale?’

Oliver blushed. ‘Oh yes, I’m sorry, Thayer. I keep it as quiet as I can.’

‘No, you silly beggar, you misunderstand me. I would like to meet her if that were possible. Does she ever come down to see you?’

‘No, I told her not to.’

‘Well then, ask her . . . to please me.’

‘Oh gosh . . . yes, Thayer, I will, but are you sure? You won’t . . . you won’t laugh?’

‘Oh no,’ Stephen said, ‘I won’t laugh.’

Her skin was almost translucent. ‘Pale, pale Dora, adorable Dora Pale,’ he murmured, turning over in bed to stroke her cheek. ‘You’re not asleep so why
pretend you are? Do you know you have freckles? Would you like me to lick them off for you?’

‘I do not have freckles,’ Dora said, her eyes still shut.

‘You do,’ he said stroking her stomach in the way he knew she liked.

‘You know, Stephen, you’re almost as good-looking as you think you are, but you’ve got a pimple coming just here,’ she pinched him quite hard on the cheek, ‘and
what does that tell us?’

‘Ouch, that hurt. So what does it tell us, mistress mine?’

‘It tells us, Master Thayer, that you are still a child and I don’t sleep with children.’

‘Oh but you do . . . frightfully well.’ He turned his handsome head to look at her and she met his stare unblinkingly. His eyes were black and lustrous and his eyebrows met above his
nose in a dramatic slash of black.

‘I do it “frightfully well”,’ she mocked. ‘Well, perhaps I do occasionally make exceptions. I like to think of myself as a teacher. Do you like me to teach
you?’

‘Extra-curricular coaching.’ He mouthed each syllable lovingly. ‘We call it extra work, you know.’

‘Huh! Extra work, you young . . . ah!’ He had touched her and she had responded as he knew she would. ‘Again, touch me there again. That’s . . . right. You’re a
good student and one day your wife will have cause to thank me. Wait!’ There was a knock on the door. ‘Be a good boy and open the door, Stephen. I ordered more champagne.’

He rolled out of bed, slung on a white bathrobe and went to the door and opened it.

‘Over there by the window . . .’ he began to say, and then stopped and wrapped the robe round him more tightly. ‘Oh, it’s you. What are you doing here? I thought you were
on the river.’

Oliver looked past his friend and mentor to the rumpled bed.

‘Who is it, darling?’ Dora said, raising her head a little off the pillow. Her eyes met those of her son which opened wider than might have been thought possible.

‘Oh Christ! Oliver, darling, it’s not what you think. We were just . . . we were just talking.’

The boy had still not said a word but his mouth hung open and the pupils of his eyes were dilated. He looked from his mother to his friend and back again. Then he turned and ran down the
corridor sobbing. Stephen, white-faced, turned to the woman in the bed who now seemed not the desirable sex siren he had just made love to so violently but a middle-aged woman with lines under her
eyes and bleached hair showing dark at the roots. ‘I’d better get dressed and go after him,’ he mumbled.

‘Oh Christ,’ she said again. ‘Oh Christ!’ Wearily, she let her head fall back upon the lipstick-stained pillow.

It was good to be home. Lord Edward Corinth lay in his bath splashing himself contentedly with an enormous yellow sponge. Now and again he put it on his head and let the water
dribble over his eyes and ears to lubricate his brain, which felt arid and infertile after the transatlantic crossing. He had disembarked from the Normandie at Southampton, along with the
other English passengers, at seven o’clock the previous morning, and reached his rooms in Albany six hours later. His man, Fenton had grilled him a chop, which he washed down with half a
bottle of Perrier-Jouet and then, overcome with lassitude, he had strolled round to the hammam in Jermyn Street. Steamed, scrubbed and massaged within an inch of his life, he had slept in his
cubicle for an hour. Then, feeling a little restored but as weak as a newborn lamb, he had tottered round to his club in St James’s. There, he hid himself away in a corner unable to face
social intercourse and had Barney, the smoking-room waiter, bring him potted shrimps, scrambled eggs, angels on horseback, along with a weak whisky and soda. After which he had snoozed in his chair
for half an hour and then crawled back home. He toyed with a pile of letters which lay on his desk but could not face opening any of them and was in bed not much after nine.

This morning he had awoken refreshed but still curiously reluctant to face the world, despite having looked forward for so long to seeing his old friends and revisiting old haunts. In the six
months he had been away, an era had ended with the death of the King on January 20th. The new King, Edward VIII, with his film-star good looks and easy charm, was hugely popular, to judge from what
he read in the papers, but he was mistrusted by the ‘old guard’ who suspected he lacked his father’s sense of duty. They did not like his friends either. In New York, Edward had
heard disquieting rumours concerning his lady friend, Mrs Simpson, a divorcée of dubious morals. It looked as though 1936 would prove to be an interesting year.

He submerged himself in the rapidly cooling water until only his aquiline nose showed above the surface like the periscope of a submarine. He suspected that Dr Freud, whose works he had been
perusing on the boat coming over, might mutter something to the effect that his bath provided a womb into which he could retreat when in need of comfort and reassurance, and it was true that just
the sight of this huge, ornate iron bath, standing foursquare in the centre of the room on massive gilt claws, had always aroused in him a most profound sense of well-being. The United States
– well, New York – seemed to assume its denizens preferred showering to lying in a soup of bath salts and soap, and the Normandie – beyond criticism in every other respect
– boasted baths which, to be enjoyed, demanded amputation at the knees. Luxurious though that great ship was, the next time he crossed the Atlantic he promised himself a berth on the Queen
Mary, which was about to set out on her maiden voyage. All the talk on the Normandie had been of this new Cunard liner whose launch demonstrated that the economic depression was at last
raising its dead hand from British industry. Among the passengers wagers were given and taken on whether or not it would wrest the Blue Riband from the Normandie which, ever since it had
made its first transatlantic crossing the previous year, had been hailed as a miracle of engineering and the acme of luxury.

Edward supposed the first-class passengers were, for the most part, good enough people but, to his jaundiced eye, they appeared a seedy set – American millionaires, their women decorated
like Christmas trees, and every kind of mountebank and charlatan. He recognised one South American card-sharp he had punched in the face on a railway train out of Valparaíso three years
before. Edward watched him playing poker with a Hollywood producer and his girlfriend and, as he was pondering whether or not to warn them that they were about to be fleeced, the man caught his eye
and had the gall to give him a wink. Edward supposed he ought to advise the company that there were sharks on board even if there were none in the ocean, but how to distinguish the predators from
their victims? He decided he did not care enough to work it out. One evening, at dinner in the art deco glory of the first-class Café Grill, a little actress, her hair unnaturally blonde and
her lips coated in vermilion – attached, he thought, to a German businessman of quite staggering corpulence – offered herself to him for dessert and he had suddenly felt disgusted with
himself and the company he was keeping.

Yes, it was good to be home. He loved New York. It invigorated him; the skyscrapers, the noise, the bustle, even the sight of the policemen, dressed up to look like postmen, gave him an
electrical charge. Each evening, as he walked down Fifth Avenue in the direction of Broadway, he found himself whistling. He had made a host of friends there. He had been elected an honorary member
of the Knickerbocker, the city’s most exclusive club, which he privately thought was even duller and more hidebound than the Athenaeum, but it was in the night-clubs, long after working New
Yorkers had taken to their beds, that he and Amy dined and danced till there was light in the sky. Amy Pageant, the girl on his arm, was Broadway’s newest, brightest star, and the couple had
been fêted in a manner which would have turned him into a conceited ass if he had not realised that their popularity, pleasant though it was, was so much hooey.

The dream could not last. Six months after Amy had flung herself into his arms in her dressing-room at the Alvin Theatre, they had regretfully come to the conclusion that they were not, after
all, in love with one another. There had been nothing so tacky as his finding her in flagrante delicto with her leading man, but he was wise enough to see that she was indeed on the point of
falling for a wealthy sprig of New York society. Better to bow out gracefully than be ejected from her apartment after some slanging match in which both parties said things they did not mean but
which left genuine hurt. No, Edward had kissed her, told her she would always have a place in his heart – that they would share some very special memories. She, for her part, had wept,
whispered tender regrets in his ear but, in the end, had not tried to shake him in his resolve to return to England and find something to do which might stretch him.

‘I’m not cut out to be a lotus-eater, darling,’ he had told Amy. ‘I’m getting lazy and that turns me into a dull dog. You are already a great star, but you still
have a world to conquer and it wouldn’t be right for me to hang on your coat-tails like some stage-door johnny until we hated the sight of each other.’

‘Never that!’ she exclaimed. ‘You and I discovered each other before any of this . . .’ She waved her arms vaguely at the bed with its pink silk sheets, the champagne
bobbing in the silver ice bucket, the vases of flowers that bedecked every available surface – the evidence of a glorious ‘first night’ when she had glittered in a Gershwin
musical which looked set to run as long as she was prepared to star in it. ‘You and I will always be . . . a part of one another.’

But she had not begged him to stay and so they had parted, still a little in love with one another, basking in a relationship from which both had drawn strength. Though Amy would not have said
it or even thought it out with cold, deliberate logic, it had helped her career to be seen with the wealthy, good-looking brother of an English duke. It had given her glamour and status –
made her invulnerable to the sneers of society matrons and eased her passage into the centre of what Edward called ‘Vanderbilt City’. She acknowledged in her heart that he gave her much
more than status: he was older than she, for one thing – almost thirty-five – and absolutely at ease with his own place in society. She had been brought up by two elderly aunts on
Canada’s new frontier and seen nothing of the world until she had come to London to meet the father who had abandoned her almost at birth. A few months later, she had been whisked off to New
York by a theatrical agent who had been taken to see her singing in a Soho night-club and had recognised star-quality when he saw it.

It could be lonely on the Great White Way, even frightening. So much was expected of her and, when she delivered, they expected more and, inevitably, success brought enemies. The society gossip
columnists had interspersed adulation with little spiteful dagger-thrusts of speculation and rumour. She was the daughter of the Canadian press lord, Joseph Weaver, but there was something
mysterious there. She had appeared from nowhere. Was she his illegitimate child by a mistress he had turned away when he was quite a young man? There was certainly no word of any mother. Amy was
able to brush off the innuendoes and the spite but there were evenings when she would read some lie about herself and run and bury her face in Edward’s shoulder and sob as if she were still a
lonely, abandoned child.

Now, back in London, lying in his bath in his spacious if rather spartan rooms, Edward hummed contentedly to himself one of his favourite songs from Girl Crazy: ‘Boy! What Love Has
Done To Me!’ Amy had sung it in the show and it still sent shivers down his spine. He could hear Fenton in the little kitchen preparing his breakfast. Unexpectedly, Fenton had adored New York
and had been reluctant to leave it. Edward had heard that he had been offered a position as butler to one of the city’s ‘royal families’ and had been touched that he had in the
end decided to stay as his gentleman’s personal gentleman. Nothing was ever said between the two of them about the temptation which had been resisted but Edward noticed that Fenton would on
occasion drop American phrases into his conversation and his breakfast eggs might be offered him ‘easy-over’ or ‘sunny-side up’.

Edward resurfaced and made a determined effort not to think of Amy. He was content to be back in London. Or rather he was not content yet, but he was determined to find a cure for his
restlessness. While he had been in New York, he had received a letter from an old Eton and Cambridge friend with a high, if ill-defined, position in the Foreign Office, offering him what sounded
very much like a job. Basil Thoroughgood was too canny to commit to paper a form of words which might be construed as anything quite as definite but there was certainly the offer of lunch and
‘a chat’. Edward had cabled that he expected to be in London on February 18th and had been surprised to receive a ‘wireless’ half-way across the Atlantic which set one
o’clock at Brooks’s – the club of which they were both members – on the 19th, only his second day back in the metropolis. It hinted at urgency on Thoroughgood’s part
but Edward could scarcely believe it. Unless Thoroughgood was a different young man from the slouching, half-asleep character he remembered from the university, he would have laid odds on
‘urgent’ not being a word in his vocabulary.

His musings were interrupted by the muffled sound of knocking and then the noise of Fenton opening the door to the apartment and exchanging some sort of greeting. Edward stopped soaping himself
and tried to make out who this unreasonably early visitor could possibly be. Confound it all, he thought irritably, couldn’t he even get dressed and have his breakfast in peace? In any case,
as far as he was aware, no one, except Thoroughgood, knew he was back in London, and none of his friends – if they had, in some magical way, discovered he was back in town – would have
dreamed of calling on him before ten o’clock at the earliest and he knew for a fact that it was only a little after nine.

After a few more moments of puzzlement, he heard Fenton’s respectful knock on the bathroom door.

‘What is it? Did I hear someone at the door, Fenton?’

‘Yes, my lord, there is a lady who wishes to speak with you.’

‘A lady? But I am in my bath. Did you tell her I was in my bath, Fenton?’

‘I did, my lord, and she said she would wait.’

Edward splashed angrily and yanked at the chain with the plug attached to it. All the pleasure of the bath leaked away with the water and, as he towelled himself, he called, ‘You
haven’t told me who it is, Fenton, who breaks in upon my ablutions at this ridiculously early hour.’

There was something cold and wet in the pit of his stomach – not the sponge lying abandoned on the wooden bath mat – which warned that he knew perfectly well the identity of his
unexpected guest. There was o