Lord John and the Private Matter (27 page)

“I could scarcely believe it. Went about in a daze for the rest of the day, and spent the night wondering what to do—but I knew it was Mayrhofer; it had to be.”

Looking up, he caught sight of Grey’s face, and a wry smile broke out upon his own.

“No, not directly. Through Maria. I had shared no woman’s bed since I began with her, and that was more than a year before. But clearly she had been infected by her whore-mongering bastard of a husband; she was innocent.”

Not only innocent, but clearly ignorant as well. Not wishing to confront her with his discovery at once, Trevelyan had gone in search of her doctor instead.

“I said that she had lost a child, just before I met her? I got the doctor who attended her to talk; he confirmed that the child had been malformed, owing to the mother’s syphilitic condition—but naturally he had kept quiet about that.”

Trevelyan’s fingers drummed restlessly on the lid of the barrel.

“The child was born malformed, but alive—it died in the cradle, a day after birth. Mayrhofer smothered it, wishing neither to be burdened by it nor to have his wife learn the cause of its misfortune.”

Grey felt his stomach contract.

“How do you know this?”

Trevelyan rubbed a hand over his face, as though tired.

“Reinhardt admitted it to her—to Maria. I brought the doctor to her, you see; forced him to tell her what he had told me. I thought—if she knew what Mayrhofer had done, infecting her, dooming their child, that perhaps she would leave him.”

She did not. Hearing out the doctor in numb silence, she had sat for a long time, considering, and then asked both Trevelyan and the doctor to go; she would be alone.

She had stayed alone for a week. Her husband was away, and she saw no one save the servants who brought her meals—all sent away, untouched.

“She thought of self-murder, she told me,” Trevelyan said, staring out toward the endless sea. “Better, she thought, to end it cleanly than to die slowly, in such fashion. Have you ever seen someone dying of the syphilis, Grey?”

“Yes,” Grey said, the bad taste creeping back into his mouth. “In Bedlam.”

One in particular, a man whose disease had deprived him both of nose and balance, so that he reeled drunkenly across the floor, crashing helplessly into the other inmates, foot stuck in a night bucket, tears and snot streaming over his rutted face. He could but hope that the syphilis had taken the man’s reason, as well, so that he was in ignorance of his situation.

He looked then at Trevelyan, envisioning for the first time that clever, narrow face, ruined and drooling. It would happen, he realized with a small shock. The only question was how long it might be before the symptoms became clear.

“If it were me, I might think of suicide, too,” he said.

Trevelyan met his eyes, then smiled ruefully.

“Would you? We are different, then,” he said, with no tone of judgment in the observation. “That course never occurred to me, until Maria showed me her pistol, and told me what she had been thinking.”

“You thought only of how the fact might be used to separate the lady from her husband?” Grey said, hearing the edge in his own voice.

“No,” Trevelyan replied, seeming unoffended. “Though that had been my goal since I met her; I did not propose to give it up. I tried to see her, after she had sent me away, but she would not receive me.”

Instead, Trevelyan had set himself to discover what remedy might be available.

“Jack Byrd knew of the difficulty; it was he who informed me that Finbar Scanlon seemed an able man in such matters. He had gone back to the apothecary’s shop, to inquire after Mrs. O’Connell’s welfare, and had become well acquainted with Scanlon, you see.”

“And that is where you met Sergeant O’Connell, returning to his home?” Grey asked, sudden enlightenment coming upon him. Trevelyan already knew of O’Connell’s peculations, and certainly had more men than Jack Byrd at his beck and call. He would have been more than capable, Grey thought, of having the Sergeant murdered, abstracting the papers for his own purposes regarding Mayrhofer. And those purposes now fulfilled, of course he could casually hand the papers back, uncaring of what damage had been done in the meantime!

He felt his blood rising at the thought—but Trevelyan was staring at him blankly.

“No,” he said. “I met O’Connell only the once, myself. Vicious sort,” he added, reflectively.

“And you did not have him killed?” Grey demanded, skepticism clear in his voice.

“No, why should I?” Trevelyan frowned at him a little; then his brow cleared.

“You thought I had him done in, in order to get the papers?” Trevelyan’s mouth twitched; he seemed to be finding something funny in the notion. “My God, John, you do have the most squalid opinion of my character!”

“You think it unjustified, do you?” Grey inquired acidly.

“No, I suppose not,” Trevelyan admitted, wiping a knuckle under his nose. He had not been recently shaved, and tiny drops of water were condensing on the sprouting whiskers, giving him a silvered look.

“But no,” he repeated. “I told you I had killed no one—nor had I anything to do with O’Connell’s death. That story belongs to Mr. Scanlon, and I am sure he will tell it to you, as soon as he is at liberty.”

Trevelyan glanced, as though despite himself, at the door that led to the quarters below, and then away.

“Should you be with her?” Grey asked quietly. “Go, if you like. I can wait.”

Trevelyan shook his head and glanced away.

“I cannot help,” he said. “And I can scarcely bear to see her in such straits. Scanlon will fetch me if—if I am needed.”

Seeming to detect some unspoken accusation in Grey’s manner, he looked up defensively.

“I did stay with her, the last time the fever came on. She sent me away, saying that it disturbed her to see my agitation. She prefers to be alone, when . . . things go wrong.”

“Indeed. As she was after learning the truth from the doctor, you said.”

Trevelyan took a deep breath, and squared his shoulders, as though setting himself for some unpleasant task.

“Yes,” he said bleakly. “Then.”

She had been alone for a week, save for the servants, who kept away at her own request. No one knew how long she had sat alone, that final day in her white-draped boudoir. It was long past dark when her husband had finally returned, somewhat the worse for drink, but still coherent enough to understand her accusation, her demand for the truth about her child.

“She said that he laughed,” Trevelyan said, his tone remote, as though reporting some business disaster; a mine cave-in, perhaps, or a sunken ship. “He told her then that he had killed the child; told her that she should be grateful to him, that he had saved her from living day after day with the shame of its deformity.”

At this, the woman who had lived patiently for years with the knowledge of infidelity and promiscuity felt the bonds of her vows break asunder, and Maria Mayrhofer had stepped across that thin line of prohibition that separates justice from vengeance. Mad with rage and sorrow, she had flung back in his teeth all the insults she had suffered through the years of their marriage, threatening to expose all his tawdry affairs, to reveal his syphilitic condition to society, to denounce him openly as a murderer.

The threats had sobered Mayrhofer slightly. Staggering from his wife’s presence, he had left her raging and weeping. She had the pistol that had been her constant companion through her week of brooding, ready to hand. She had hunted often in the hills near her Austrian home, was accustomed to guns; it was the work of a moment to load and prime the weapon.

“I do not know for sure what she intended,” Trevelyan said, his eyes fixed on a flight of gulls that wheeled over the ocean, diving for fish. “She told me that she didn’t know, herself. Perhaps she meant to kill herself—or both of them.”

As it was, the door to her boudoir had opened a few minutes later, and her husband lurched back in, clad in the green velvet dress which she wore to her assignations with Trevelyan. Flushed with drink and temper, he taunted her, saying that she dared not expose him—or he would see that both she and her precious lover paid a worse price. What would become of Joseph Trevelyan, he demanded, lurching against the doorframe, once it was known that he was not only an adulterer but also a sodomite?

“And so she shot him,” Trevelyan concluded, with a slight shrug. “Straight through the heart. Can you blame her?”

“How do you suppose he learned of your assignations at Lavender House?” Grey asked, ignoring the question. He wondered with a certain misgiving what Richard Caswell might have told about his own presence there, years before. Trevelyan had not mentioned it, and surely he would have, if . . .

Trevelyan shook his head, sighed, and closed his eyes against the glare of the sun off the water.

“I don’t know. As I said, Reinhardt Mayrhofer was an intriguer. He had his sources of information—and he knew Magda, who came from the village near his estate. I paid her well, but perhaps he paid her better. You can never trust a whore, after all,” he added, with a slight tinge of bitterness.

Thinking of Nessie, Grey thought that it depended on the whore, but did not say so.

“Surely Mrs. Mayrhofer did not smash in her husband’s face,” he said instead. “Was that you?”

Trevelyan opened his eyes and nodded.

“Jack Byrd and I.” He lifted his head, searching the rigging, but the two Byrds had flown. “He is a good fellow, Jack. A good fellow,” he repeated, more strongly.

Brought to her senses by the pistol’s report, Maria Mayrhofer had at once stepped from her boudoir and called a servant, whom she sent posthaste across the City to summon Trevelyan. Arriving with his trusted servant, the two of them had carried the body, still clad in green velvet, out to the carriage house, debating what to do with it.

“I could not allow the truth to come out,” Trevelyan explained. “Maria might easily hang, should she come to trial—though surely there was never a murder so well-deserved. Even were she acquitted, though, the simple fact of a trial would mean exposure. Of everything.”

It was Jack Byrd who thought of the blood. He had slipped out, returning with a bucket of pig’s blood from a butcher’s yard. They had smashed in the corpse’s face with a shovel, and then bundled both body and bucket into the carriage. Jack had driven the equipage the short distance to St. James’s Park. It was past midnight by that time, and the torches that normally lit the public pathways were long since extinguished.

They had tethered the horses and carried the body swiftly a little way into the park, there dumping it under a bush and dousing it with blood, then escaping back to the carriage.

“We hoped that the body would be taken for that of a simple prostitute,” Trevelyan explained. “If no one examined it carefully, they would assume it to be a woman. If they discovered the truth of the sex . . . well, it would cause more curiosity, but men of certain perverse predilections also are prone to meet with violent death.”

“Quite,” Grey murmured, keeping his face carefully impassive. It was not a bad plan—and he was, in spite of everything, pleased to have deduced it correctly. The death of an anonymous prostitute—of either sex—would cause neither outcry nor investigation.

“Why the blood, though? It was apparent—once one looked—that the man had been shot.”

Trevelyan nodded.

“Yes. We thought that the blood might obscure the cause of death, by suggesting that he had been beaten to death—but principally, its purpose was to prevent anyone undressing the body, and thus discovering its sex.”

“Of course.” Usable clothes found on a corpse would routinely be stripped and sold, either by the constables who found it, by the morgue-keeper who took charge of it, or, at the last, by the gravedigger who undertook to bury the body in some anonymous potter’s field. But no one—other than Grey himself—would have touched that sodden, reeking garment.

Had the fact of the green velvet dress not caught Magruder’s notice, or if they had had the luck to dispose of the body in another district of the City, it was very likely that no one would have bothered examining the body at all; it would simply have been put down as one of the casualties of London’s dark world and dismissed, as casually as one might dismiss the death of a stray dog crushed by a coach’s wheels.

“Sir?”

He hadn’t heard the sound of approaching footsteps, and was startled to find Jack Byrd standing behind them, his dark face serious. Trevelyan took one look at it, and headed for the doors to the companionway.

“Mrs. Mayrhofer is worse?” Grey asked, watching the Cornishman stumble through a knot of sailors mending canvas.

“I don’t know, me lord. I think she may be better. Mr. Scanlon come out and sent me to fetch Mr. Joseph. He says as how he’ll be in the crew’s mess for a bit, should you want to talk to him, though,” he added, as an obvious afterthought.

Grey glanced at the young man, and felt a twitch of recognition. Not the family resemblance to young Tom; something else. Jack Byrd’s eyes were still focused on his master, as Trevelyan reached the hatchway, and there was something unguarded in his face that Grey’s nervous system discerned long before his mind made sense of it.

It was gone in the next instant, Jack Byrd’s face lapsing back into an older, leaner version of his younger brother’s as he turned to Grey.

“Will you be wanting Tom, my lord?” he asked.

“Not now,” Grey responded automatically. “I’ll go and talk to Mr. Scanlon. Tell Tom I’ll send for him when I need him.”

“Very good, my lord.” Jack Byrd bowed gravely, an elegant footman’s gesture at odds with his seaman’s slops, and walked away, leaving Grey to find his own way.

He made his way downward in search of the crew’s mess, scarcely noticing his surroundings, mind belatedly searching for logical connexions that might support the conclusion his lower faculties had leaped to.

Jack Byrd knew of the difficulty,
Trevelyan had said, referring to his own infection.
It was he who informed me that Finbar Scanlon seemed an able man in such matters.