A Hunt By Moonlight (Werewolves and Gaslight Book 1) (15 page)

“That didn’t work out so well for me last time,” Royston muttered into his drink.

Willie chuckled. “You’re too much of a gentleman. You didn’t even know if it was yours. Bessie might not have been in the profession, but you certainly weren’t the only man she invited to her bed. Be glad she took the easy way out after you offered to marry her.”

“Ssh!” Royston looked around, although no one seemed to be listening over the general hubbub. What they had done was shameful and illegal. It hadn’t been easy, either, not for him and definitely not for her. It also hadn’t been cheap to pay a doctor to risk his license and his liberty.
 

“Better than the alternative. Bessie was a sweet bit of fun, but for marriage? And you still on a constable’s salary then. It would have broken you.”

Royston shrugged to avoid admitting that he’d been relieved as much as shocked that the girl had turned down his offer for her hand and asked him to pay the abortionist instead. “Others manage.” Parker had a wife and, what, three children now? No wonder the man always looked so thin-stretched. He was fortunate that Willie had known someone, helped to arrange things. Fortunate that he had offered to do so, knowing that he could have been arrested as an accessory if things had gone wrong. Willie, uncharacteristically, had felt a little responsible, having talked Bessie into ‘making a man of him’ in the first place.
 

It had been Bessie’s choice; his only role had been making sure that she got to someone who knew what he was doing, so she didn’t end up bleeding out in some back alley. Yes, he was fortunate that he got through his mistake with so few consequences. And yet sometimes Royston thought about what it would be like if she had chosen differently.

 
“I haven’t told you my good news,” Willie said. “I’ve a job now, a good one.”

“What is it this time?”
 

Whatever it was, Royston hoped it lasted more than two weeks. Since the Yard had fired Willie, a month and a half of employment at the same job had been the record. The average had been far less.

“I’m walking the boards, my friend. Shakespeare. We open in two nights. There’s a ticket on hold for you. Paid for, even. Nothing too good for my best friend, my Lancelot.”

Royston smiled at the reference to the childhood games they’d played, battling imaginary dragons and rescuing made-up maidens. Willie had always been Arthur, of course.

A girl brushed by—a young woman, actually—a laundress by her rough, red hands but dressed up for her night on the town. She returned Royston’s polite smile with one of her own but answered Willie’s wink with a smile that held more promise.

Royston had long ago resigned himself to the fact that his best friend was a charming rascal, able to talk women into more than he ought with just a grin and a few sweet words. Royston, on his best behavior, might talk a woman into walking out with him once or twice, but beyond the prostitutes who saw him as a bit of safe and harmless fun, it never went anywhere from there.

He suspected he’d be drinking alone before the night was through.

***

A parcel awaited him when he arrived home two days from a fruitless round of interviews, a box wrapped in plain brown paper, neatly tied with ribbon, and accompanied by a thick envelope of better-quality paper than he was accustomed to seeing. He took it up to his rooms, shed his overcoat and turned on the gas light. Inside the envelope was a smaller envelope of even finer paper, addressed to a lord he’d never heard of, and a single sheet of paper in a lady’s hand.

Inspector Jones,

I know something about Lord Alexander Downey that I dare not put to paper. I know that Lord Markham will not be at the masquerade. You and he are of a height, and if you are costumed, the doorman will not know the difference. As for the other guests, the whole point of the masquerade is the mystery, and it is not unusual for guests to deliberately disguise voices and confuse identities, so I think you will not need to worry about passing with his friend. Present the invitation at the door and then look for a tall woman dressed as a blue peacock.

 
There was no signature. Royston opened the invitation and looked for the date of the ball. Tomorrow night. He untied the parcel, unwrapped it, and lifted the lid from the box. A half-mask shaped like a fox, covered with what was doubtless real fox fur, and a velvet tabard in fox-red to go over his best suit. At least he didn’t have to worry about arranging fancy-dress, and the costume was made in such a way that fitting wasn’t needed.

Smiling in fond memory of a case that had ended well, he stroked a finger along the nose of the fox mask, contemplating his choices.

The commissioner would have his hide
and
his job if he were discovered. Bad enough pestering his betters with questions. To go among them disguised as one of them would be beyond impudence. Already the public bandied about words like
spying
and
entrapment
when they protested the Yard’s use of detectives in plain clothes. This could create a furor.

Fortunately, he had a fair amount of
carte blanche
in the performance of his duties. The commissioner need not know until after the fact and need not know at all if the evening didn’t yield valuable information. Still, if he were a man with any career sense, a man like Miss Chatham’s new fiancé, for example, he wouldn’t go.

Royston sighed. He would have to pay for the cab fare out of his own funds. He didn’t dare expense it.

***

 
Royston stepped down from the hackney cab into a fairy tale. The white marble edifice which hosted the masquerade glowed from gaslights lit at every window. Footmen opened the wide double doors to swans and storybook princes, knights and owls and myriad zoological wonders never known in nature. He set his fox mask more firmly on his face. His very best suit was still far beneath the standards of this gathering, but under the tabard it would pass well enough. He presented the invitation to the footman. The man studied it for a moment and Royston tensed. If he were caught at this, especially after the commissioner’s warning, it could very well be the end of his career.

The footman bowed him into the hall, which was elaborately decorated to resemble a mythical forest. Flowers and vines and potted trees augmented the sort of painted canvas murals normally used as stage backdrops to hide the walls. In the mural at the head of the hall a white castle stood on a distant, high hill, as though the forest that was the ballroom opened out into a clearing from which Camelot could be viewed. Metallic, automaton birds in unlikely colors flitted here and there. Royston suspected a touch of glamour to support the illusion.

The dance floor whirled with mythical creatures. Around the edges more masked figures stood in couples and groups, talking and laughing and flirting freely, their behavior more licentious for their disguises. What would it be like to belong to this world? It was a wonderland, if one didn’t think about the children starving in London while the banquet tables groaned with enough food to sustain a whole neighborhood for a week, or about the seamstresses going blind sewing those costumes by candlelight while their children huddled five to a bed for warmth.

 
He picked out a pair of ladies in matching green peacock dresses, and a lone white peacock with a train so long he wondered that it didn’t get stepped in in the press and torn from her dress. Did they not realize that in nature only the male of the species was so brilliantly colored, or was it, like so many unpleasant or inconvenient facts of the world, something that ladies of a certain class chose not to know?
 

He saw Downey a few feet away, mask dangling from his hand, talking to a girl in a fairy costume who looked so young and innocent Royston wanted to enquire if she were up past her bed-time. More, he wanted to warn her about what Downey was like beneath the charm he so evidently plied. But that wasn’t what he was there for, and he had no right to interfere. Creating a scene would only risk revealing his identity and prevent him from keeping his mysterious assignation.

A servant in a plain black half-mask brought by a tray of champagne flutes. Royston accepted one. Technically he was not on duty, and having a glass in his hand excused him from the dance floor. He spotted a fair-haired lady dressed as a blue peacock at the far end of the dance floor and started to make his way toward her. But then the crowd shifted and he saw another lady, dark-haired, in a more elaborate blue peacock dress just a little to his left.
 

Two blue peacocks! How was he to know which was the right one?

“Your pardon, sir, do I know you?”

Royston turned to face a white fox half-mask with a woman’s predatory smile beneath. The woman’s white silken dress nipped in so tightly at the waist that he thought he could reach around the circumference with his hands and have his fingers almost meet, and the neckline plunged so dramatically he was tempted to offer her his cloak.

“I don’t think so,” he answered quite truthfully.

“Perhaps we should change that. You look like a fine, frisky fox. ” She smiled boldly, her eyes sparkling a challenge behind her mask.

He had heard the rumors that Society used the anonymous nature of these affairs to behave in ways that would otherwise be considered quite scandalous. If she were to find out that she was flirting with a member of the police force, in her eyes no better than a common tradesman, he would be unemployed come morning.

“The gentleman has already promised me a turn around the garden,” a woman’s voice purred behind him.

Royston spun. The ebony-haired woman in the blue peacock dress stood behind him, too close for convention. He couldn’t step forward to put more distance between them without crowding into the white fox-woman.

“Isn’t that correct?” the blue peacock prompted.
 

The corseting of her dress accented her generous curves, and the rich colors of her dress accented the dark, shiny curls that tumbled artfully from her up-do.
 

“Y-yes,” Royston stammered. “Yes, quite.”
 

She laced her arm through his, exactly as though he were a close acquaintance and a gentleman of her class, although she knew he was neither. Assuming she was the right blue peacock, and he wasn’t about to be trapped in a horrible case of mistaken identity.

Her body pressed against his, warm and silken, and her, sweet, subtle perfume enveloped him. His body reminded him that it had been a long time since one of the women in Lambeth had persuaded him up to her rooms.

He was on a case. He was on a case, and she was far above his station.

He let her lead him out past a game of charades underway on a side porch and around the house to a small gazebo out in the garden that seemed made for trysts of one sort or another. Rose and jasmine perfumed the air, complementing the scent the lady wore, as though the night was filled with her essence.
Above your station. Focus on the case.

The comfortably-padded bench in the gazebo was small enough that they sat closer than propriety warranted. The only other option would be to sit across from one another, far enough apart that if they could hear one another their voices would carry. Royston didn’t mind the intimate seating as much as he should.

“There has not been a party here in many years,” his companion said, her voice a soft, husky whisper that compelled him to lean in to hear better. “Lord and Lady Beauchamp are only now getting over their great tragedy. But you wouldn’t know about that.”

“You must be aware, ma’am, that I am not well acquainted with the hosts of this party.” He didn’t even know her name, or if she had a title, so he chose the most generic of the polite forms of address.

“They had a daughter, Rosalyn. A beautiful girl, as fresh and fair as the dawn, to quote one suitor’s rather passionate if silly love poem. I daresay we all would have hated her, were she not also the sweetest and kindest of souls. She was betrothed to one of her father’s friends, a Colonel who had quite distinguished himself on and off the field of battle. He was a man twice her age, but she was an obedient daughter and would not argue her father’s choice. The wedding was to take place just after her twentieth birthday. Three months prior to the day, her body was found on the bottom of the trout pond at her family’s country estate.”

“Murder?” Royston asked.
 

Why else would she have asked him here? Only a drowning, even murder-by-drowning, would seem to have little to do with the Doctor Death case.

“The coroner ruled it accident, but everyone assumed that was to avoid having to bury a girl from a good family in unhallowed ground.”

“Suicide?”

“They tried to keep it a secret that she was three months’ pregnant when she died, but rumors will out. Too far gone to hide it for a wedding in three months’ time, and too far gone to pass the babe off as premature.”

“If the father had been her betrothed, they would have just found some excuse to move up the date of the wedding,” Royston said.

“There would have been whispers, of course,” the lady agreed. “But all would be forgotten with the next Season’s scandal.”

“You are about to tell me that she was keeping close company with Lord Downey,” Royston said. “If seduction were a crime, there would be no lack of work for carpenters, because there wouldn’t be enough gallows in all the Empire.”