Miser of Mayfair (4 page)

Fiona Sinclair was a dazzling Highland beauty with a creamy skin and thick black hair that shone with blue lights. Her large eyes with their heavy fringe of lashes were grey, clear, silvery grey. She was wearing an old-fashioned gown with the waist where a woman’s waist should be instead of the current fashion, which put it up under the armpits. Her waist was tiny, her bosom perfect.

‘How did I get to bed?’ asked Mr Sinclair, saying the first thing that came into his head.

‘You fell on the floor,’ said Fiona calmly. ‘I put you to bed.’

Mr Sinclair felt down his large body and found it clothed only in his dirty nightshirt. He blushed for the first time in years. ‘You’ve got a good back on ye if you could lift the likes of me,’ he said, trying to sound as hearty and avuncular as possible.

Fiona sat quietly, her hands in her lap. Her hands were long fingered and very white.

How beautiful she is, thought Mr Sinclair. How utterly useless! He could practically see the workhouse walls closing in on him. A thought struck him. ‘I’m surprised a lassie like you could make her way here without all the lads in Edinburgh sniffing at her heels.’

‘I covered my head and the most of my face with the hood of my cloak,’ said Fiona. ‘Mr Jamie told me I was so ugly that people stared at me, and I do not like to be stared at.’

‘You’re the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen,’ said Mr Sinclair bluntly. ‘Jamie must have wanted you for hisself.’

A tiny frown marred the perfection of Fiona’s brow.

‘Never mind,’ went on Mr Sinclair. ‘I have something to do that’s private. Why don’t you go back to my brother’s?’

‘I cannot,’ said Fiona. ‘The house was left to an orphanage, and so I was turned out.’

‘That’s not possible,’ said Mr Sinclair hotly. ‘The funeral’s only tomorrow.’

‘Mr Jamie told the orphanage that they might take over the minute he died. He told them I had been provided for.’

‘Oh, he did, did he?’ snarled Mr Sinclair. ‘What exactly was your relationship with Jamie?’

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘To put it bluntly, were you substitute daughter or mistress?’

‘Oh, no, I am too ugly to have deserved either position. Mr Jamie told me so. He was rescuing me from myself. He said he saw harlotry in my eyes.’

‘He was looking in his ain mirror, the dirty auld miser.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘God grant me patience. Look, I have very little money. I cannot keep you.’

‘Very well,’ said Fiona equably.

‘So you will need to find work.’

‘Yes,’ said Fiona. She gave him a sudden, dazzling smile. Mr Sinclair blinked.

The gill bell sounded. He had a longing to escape this problem, to go back to the tavern for one last meridian. Then he would need to send her away somewhere so that he could hang himself. He would scrawl a will on a bit of paper leaving her the apartment and its contents.

‘Leave me,’ he said curtly. ‘Take away the tea. I am going to get dressed.’

She rose, curtsied, and glided from the room. Mr Sinclair wondered what she was thinking, and finally came to the conclusion that she thought about very little.

His clothes felt different. He realized his coat had been sponged and pressed and his shirt and cravat were white and crisp. How she had managed to achieve all these miracles during the night, he could not fathom. But his morale was rising with the unaccustomed feel of fresh linen next to his skin.

When he emerged from his bedroom, it was to find his small parlour shining like a new pin. The brass fender in front of the blazing fire shone like gold. The room smelled clean and fresh. In a sudden burst of gratitude Mr Sinclair said, ‘Hey, lassie, put on your cloak and I’ll take ye for a dram.’

She obediently put on her cloak and then dragged the hood over her head so that it concealed most of her features.

‘There’s no need for that,’ said Mr Sinclair. ‘Put your hood back. You are fair to look on.’

‘But Mr Jamie said—’

‘Tish! Cunning Jamie knew you were a diamond of the first water, but he didn’t want you to know it.’

Again, that puzzled little frown. But she obediently put back her hood. The cloak was an old, blue woollen one, but her dazzling looks seemed to turn the cloth to velvet. Mr Sinclair felt his heartbeats quicken. It was decades since he had had a pretty woman on his arm.

Their progress down the Royal Mile caused a sensation. Men stood dead in their tracks and stared open-mouthed. Carriages jammed the narrow street. Drivers stood up on the boxes of their coaches and craned their necks for a last glimpse of Fiona Sinclair as she tripped along daintily by Mr Sinclair’s side.

The day was windy, but there was a faint, warm promise of spring in the air. Bursting with pride, Mr Sinclair ushered Fiona into John Dowie’s tavern.

Now, although quite respectable ladies had frequented the taverns in his youth, a new wave of gentility had put paid to such free and easy democracy, and there were only men in the narrow room when Mr Sinclair entered with Fiona on his arm – men who rose to their feet.

‘Sit down!’ bawled Mr Sinclair, embarrassed. ‘Have ye no’ seen a lassie afore?’

The gentlemen slowly sank back down into their seats and went on staring. Mr Sinclair ordered a bottle of claret. There was no use in saving money now that he meant to end it all. But, somehow, yesterday’s despair seemed to have fled. Fiona delicately sipped her claret.

‘How did you come to live with Jamie?’ asked Mr Sinclair, forgetting all the staring eyes in the pleasure of his first sip of wine.

‘I was at the orphanage, and Mr Jamie was one of the trustees. The governor of the orphanage informed me one day that Mr Jamie had adopted me as his ward and I was to go with him and be a good girl and learn my scriptures.’

‘And was he kind to you?’

‘Oh, yes, very kind. He would read me the scriptures and make me pray to God to bear the burden of my ugliness.’

‘My dear girl, you’re beautiful.’

‘You are the only person who thinks so, and it is very kind of you to lie.’

‘I’m not lying,’ howled Mr Sinclair. He lowered his voice. ‘Jamie didn’t . . . well . . . touch you in any way?’

‘Yes.’

‘Michty me! Worse than I thought.’

‘He would sometimes stroke my hair and call me his poor child.’

‘And that’s all?’

‘Of course. Did you mean anything else?’

Mr Sinclair pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket, noticed with vague surprise that it was clean, and mopped his forehead. ‘No, no,’ he said.

His eye fell on the copy of
The Morning Post
that had been left on the tavern table by the two advocates. He idly turned the pages, remembering vaguely what they had said about the London Season.

His mouth fell open as an idea hit him. He looked at Fiona and back at the paper, and then back at Fiona again. How wonderful it would be if Jamie, looking down from heaven, or more probably up from hell, could see that his bequest had turned into a fortune after all!

There was no doubt that a girl of such exquisite beauty as Fiona could take London by storm. Mr Sinclair began to perspire, and thoughts, hopes, and ambitions crowded into his head.

But no one on earth, that is, no one worth knowing, would call on a girl who lived in some cheap part of town. He turned the paper over and over, abstractedly reading the advertisements, only half taking in what he read. And then, all at once, one advertisement seemed to leap up out of the page.

A H
OUSE FOR
T
HE
S
EASON
Gentleman’s residence, 67,
Clarges Street, Mayfair.
Furnished town house. Trained
servants. Rent: £80 sterling.
Apply, Mr Palmer, 25, Holborn.

Mr Sinclair had visited London several times when he was a young man. He knew Clarges Street and knew that the rent, although it might seem enormous to some, was in fact ridiculously cheap for a town house in Mayfair. If he sold his own apartment, say, and everything in it, he could raise just enough to take Fiona to London for a Season.
Then
, if nothing came of it, he would hang himself.

He looked at Fiona. She sat there, vague, calm, and extraordinarily beautiful. He realized with alarm that this treasure was being exposed to the vulgar gaze of what seemed like the half of Edinburgh, since more and more men had crowded into the tavern to stare at Fiona.

‘Come along,’ he said, leaving a bottle of wine unfinished for the first time in his life.

The gentlemen of the tavern fell back as if before royalty as he led Fiona out. He could feel notes being thrust into his pockets, and knew they would all be from men begging permission to call on him. But
his
Fiona should go to the highest bidder. Why waste such sweetness on some mere shopkeeper or advocate? Any Scotchman with
real
money went to London for the Season.

Followed by an admiring throng, Mr Sinclair led Fiona back home, doing mathematical sums in his head. Then he became aware that several of the gentlemen had broken out of their stupefied trance and were pressing forward, thrusting flowers and notes on Fiona. Mr Sinclair scowled horribly. He was desperate now to send an express letter to this man Palmer. The coach only took forty-five and a half hours to reach London, the Royal Mails being so fast some people would not journey on them for fear of a seizure caused by travelling at fifteen miles per hour.

‘Put your hood up,’ he ordered sharply, as more admirers pressed around.

Fiona obeyed. ‘I told you I was ugly,’ she said.

A blackbird flew down the chimney of Number 67 Clarges Street and batted the walls with its sooty wings, looking for a way out. Before MacGregor could slaughter the bird, Lizzie seized it up, ran to the kitchen door, and let it out. It flew straight up to the roof of the house opposite, and, after a few moments, shook out its sooty wings and began to sing.

Lizzie stood with her hands clasped until MacGregor told her sharply to scrub down the walls as a punishment for her folly. Lizzie turned a radiant face up to the cook. ‘It’s an omen,’ she breathed. ‘This house has been let. I
feel
it.’

‘Havers,’ said the cook sourly. But some old superstitious fear stirred in his Highland blood, and he kept clear of little Lizzie for the rest of the day.

* * *

Hectic weeks followed for Mr Sinclair. Some drunken Highland laird with more money than sense paid him handsomely for his apartment in which said Highland laird meant to house his new mistress.

Mr Sinclair had not attended his brother’s funeral. The fact was noted in a report in an Edinburgh newspaper. It seemed appalling that such a great philanthropist as Mr Jamie Sinclair should go to his grave unmourned by his only brother.

During all the bustle of preparation, Mr Sinclair had not really time to find out what went on behind Fiona’s placid brow. She had accepted the decision to move to London with the same tranquillity as she accepted everything. Mr Sinclair, when he thought of her at all, decided she was somewhat touched in her upperworks, but none the worse for that, since it was well known that the aristocracy did not favour clever women.

By the time he had paid for two inside seats on the Mail and had sent a deposit of £25 to Mr Palmer – dispatching the latter without even waiting for Mr Palmer’s letter of acceptance – Mr Sinclair calculated that he had £800 left. Gamblers in London, he knew, could lose as much as £800 or more on the throw of a die. It would not go very far. He would need to rack his brains for a plan to launch Fiona without actually putting his hand in his pocket. He had the right address. All he needed was a scheme.

Beautiful as Fiona was, without stability, riches, or family in her background, she might either be offered the post of someone’s mistress or have to marry the first man who asked her. Mr Sinclair felt he owed her more than that. She would have to marry to justify the expense, but he wanted the girl to have a choice.

He had never had much luck with the cards, but, in the hope that he might improve his performance, he practised nightly with Fiona, teaching her how to play piquet, silver loo, whist, hazard dice, and faro. But he came to the conclusion that the idea of gambling was hopeless because Fiona – who, anyone could see, had little brain – managed to beat him every time. He decided to shelve the problem until they were on the road. He had found in the past that the swaying motion of the coach activated his mind wonderfully.

‘Who has called?’ asked Lizzie, opening the kitchen window to let in the first breath of spring air.

‘It’s Mr Palmer, and get on with your work,’ said the housekeeper, Mrs Middleton.

‘God rot his black heart,’ muttered MacGregor.

‘Mr Rainbird is with him upstairs,’ said Mrs Middleton fussily. ‘Alice, take that tray up to the drawing room. Have we no cakes or biscuits?’

‘No,’ growled the cook, ‘and if we had, I wouldnae be wastin’ them on Palmer.’

Alice straightened the cap on her blond hair and went out carrying the tray with maddening slowness. Everything the stately Alice did was slow and studied. When she came back, Mrs Middleton looked at her anxiously. ‘How are things?’

Alice shrugged, a long, slow sort of shrug that seemed to go on forever. ‘Mr Palmer is reminding Mr Rainbird that he is tied to this house forever,’ she said.

‘Oh, dear,
poor
Mr Rainbird,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘Now he’ll be in
such
a temper. Has Jenny done the bedrooms?’

‘What is there to be done?’ asked Alice. ‘It’s hard cleaning and dusting when there ain’t nobody to clean and dust for.’

‘Isn’t anybody,’ corrected Mrs Middleton primly.

Alice gave her a slow look of surprise. ‘Now didn’t I just say that?’

Mrs Middleton went to take down the canister of Bohea; the little Hysop tea there was being saved for high days and holidays. She felt sure Mr Rainbird would be in the need of something sustaining. Mr Palmer had no doubt called only to enjoy the exercising of his power.

Half an hour passed before they heard Rainbird’s step on the stairs. He burst into the kitchen, his eyes sparkling. ‘The house is let,’ he cried. He seized Mrs Middleton and began to dance about the kitchen with her.