Prince of Secrets Page 11

  Everyone nodded solemnly. Cobie wondered what those assembled might say if they knew of Sir Ratcliffe’s other, hidden, exploits. He thought of dead Lizzie, and hoped that further revenge for her broken body was on its way.

  In the corridor the Professor, as Hendrick Van Deusen was nicknamed, drew him on one side. ‘You have got what you wanted then, Jake,’ he said, in a low voice, so that none should overhear them, ‘I know that you are after Heneage’s blood. I only ask that you go carefully. We are not in the Wild West.’

  Another warning! Everyone seemed to be free with them these days. Cobie retorted, his own voice low, ‘More’s the pity, perfesser.’ He had dropped into a Texan drawl, far removed from his society one. ‘But be sure that I shall go carefully. He deserves everything that is coming to him.’

  The Professor was shaking his head, ‘Oh, Jake, Jake! There is a limit to how far you can set the world to rights. I’ll be your back-up whenever I can, you only have to ask, but the risks you are running are greater than you think.’

  ‘They are my risks, perfesser, and my reasons for taking them are sound, I do assure you. No back-up is needed, I won’t involve anyone but myself in this—except that I hope Kenilworth and his friends may be able to do my work for me.’

  His friend was still shaking his head. ‘You have been successful for so long, Jumping Jake, that that alone frightens me. The pitcher may go too often to the well…’

  He stopped on seeing the expression on Cobie’s face. It was one he knew well, and there was no standing against it. More, he had seen that expression before, when the man before him had saved his life, not once, but twice, and again, in a time of great danger for them both, when only the younger man’s courage and brains had saved them again.

  ‘Oh, very well, have it your way. Bring the law of the gun to the English counties if you must. But don’t say that I didn’t warn you of what might follow. And now let us talk of other things, for both our sakes.’

  Dinah had been sitting in the drawing room in attendance on the Princess of Wales who had made something of a favourite of her. But all the time that she talked and laughed, stabbed her needle in and out of the canvas, one thing, and one thing only, had occupied her mind.

  She was losing him. Ever since the evening on which she had confronted him with her knowledge of the theft of the diamonds, her husband had been distancing himself from her. Oh, he was not doing it cruelly or carelessly, and only someone who could read him as well as she could would even have realised what he was doing.

  Before the theft he had begun to be open with her, she had started to feel that she was beginning to know the man behind the mask he always wore, that he was at last prepared to reveal his true self to her, but since then everything had changed. He was always courteous, and at night when they made love he was even more tender and considerate than he had ever been. There was, indeed, a sweetness about his loving, as though he were showing her a different man, someone young, someone innocent, who was almost as inexperienced as she was. Which made the daylight man who was so impersonal, who now allowed her no access to his inner self, even more difficult to bear.

  Her defences were down. She had erected them before she had married him, because she had told herself that she hated him. After the marriage she had retained them to prevent him from overwhelming her, and later still she had reinforced them to protect herself from the knowledge that although she might love him, he did not love her. But the weeks of being with him, of being his wife in every sense, had changed everything so that she had even told him that she loved him, something she had resolved never to do because of the power over her that it would give him.

  She had been right to protect herself, and wrong to tell him the truth, but she could not prevent herself from continuing to love him and to be fearful for him. She suddenly wanted to be with him. She knew that there was something in the wind, and without knowing why, she knew that it was something to do with Sir Ratcliffe Heneage and that it was dangerous.

  She rose, muttered an apology to the Princess, said that she needed to go to her room, and set off to find Cobie. She had heard Mr Van Deusen say something about the smoking room, and she walked in that direction. Now this was being foolish, for she couldn’t go in, and didn’t even know whether Cobie was still there, but he drew her, as he always did, like a magnet. He had become her Pole Star.

  She passed Lord Kenilworth, who nodded abstractedly at her. He was followed by several of his friends, but Cobie and Mr Van Deusen were not with them. She walked on—she could not, in decency, go back to the Princess so soon after leaving her—and then, just before she rounded a corner, she heard his voice. He was speaking in low tones, and so was Mr Van Deusen, but her hearing was uncommonly acute and she stopped, to listen unashamedly to them. She was his wife, and she deserved to know what the pair of them were hatching; she was sure that they were hatching something.

  She heard most of their conversation, heard Mr Van Deusen call him Jake, and that made sense, for was he not Jacobus? But Jumping Jake? Why did he call him that? And she had been right about Sir Ratcliffe. Cobie was, in Mr Van Deusen’s words, after him. And they had been in the Territory together. What Territory was that? Somewhere in the United States presumably. She must try to find out where.

  The most important thing of all was that he was doing, or trying to do, something illegal, something dangerous, and Mr Van Deusen was trying to stop him—as she would, if she could.

  Dinah had never felt so helpless. For a moment she was almost ready to pick up her skirts and run away, resign herself to being an ignorant unloved wife, perhaps even find consolation with someone else as Violet and the rest did, become one of the Prince’s favourites, even. But she hadn’t married him for that.

  She turned the corner at last, and said in the sweetest, most child-like voice she could muster, ‘Oh, Cobie, Mr Van Deusen, there you are. I thought that you were with Lord Kenilworth, but he went by some time ago without you. I wanted to take a turn in the gardens with you. This delightful autumn weather may not hold for long, Violet says.’

  She knew that she sounded as vacuous as most of the women did when talking to men, however plainly and practically they talked in their absence. She had rarely done so to Cobie, but perhaps now was the time to begin if he persisted in treating her as a child.

  He looked a little surprised, she noticed, but suddenly gave her his brilliant white smile. ‘Why, of course, my dear. You will excuse me, Hendrick, unless you would like to come with us and have a botany lesson from Dinah—her knowledge of plants is encyclopaedic, I assure you.’

  Yes, he was at his worst, treating her as though she were a fool, and for one moment blind rage filled her, the parallel had she but known it of her husband’s rages. She mastered herself and took his arm, as Mr Van Deusen, surveying her with his most sardonic smile, as though he had stripped away flesh, nerves and bone to reveal the working of her brain to him, bowed his refusal, with the words, ‘Not this evening, I fear, I have letters to write. Another time, Lady Dinah, perhaps.’

  Dinah had been right. Mr Van Deusen had read her correctly. Walking to his own room to read Kant, not to write letters, he thought, not for the first time, that his friend, Jumping Jake, would do well not to underestimate his apparently innocent young wife!

  Chapter Six

  Afterwards argument raged. People took sides. Some said that Sir Ratcliffe had been a sacrificial goat for the Prince of Wales and his friends. Others said that Cobie Grant had borne witness against him because of jealousy over Susanna Winthrop, never mind that he had just taken a pretty young wife. Rainsborough was known to be careless—therefore his evidence was tainted.

  Young Ffolliot, who had been the originator of the whole thing was, of course, inexperienced. Dagenham and Kenilworth had been led by the nose, and the Prince, afraid of another scandal involving him, had let them take over. A subsidiary member of the plot, Mr Hendrick Van Deusen, was yet another dubious Yankee, like Grant. Who knows why he mi
ght have said that he had seen Sir Ratcliffe cheating?

  The result was that an innocent man, worse, a man who had just had a valuable heirloom stolen in Kenilworth’s home, had been pilloried and ruined.

  Some time later, of course, when even more lurid events involving Sir Ratcliffe had delighted the newspapers and their readers, different things were said. It was always true that the greatest believers in his innocence were those who had not been members of the Markendale house-party, and who had not watched him play baccarat.

  The religious, and there were many in the England of the 1890s, called down a plague on all of them for playing cards and gambling into the small hours. Never mind that the stakes were also small. The fact that the Prince of Wales was present was the worst offence of all.

  Afterwards Kenilworth, Dagenham and the rest were to ask themselves glumly why they had imagined that the whole thing could be hushed up, that the scandal would never enter the public domain. They should have had the sense to see that it was too gross to be concealed. Beauchamp, the grey man, reproached himself for as long as he lived for not realising exactly how brazen Sir Ratcliffe Heneage was prepared to be when he saw ruin staring him in the face.

  Cobie Grant’s wry thought, long after the event, was that he had been so anxious not to have to deal with Sir Ratcliffe himself that he had believed that to catch him cheating would result in his social ruin: that he would, quietly and conveniently, be cast into outer darkness, broken and penniless. He should have learned long before that life was never as easy as that.

  Cornered rats fight—especially when death, or its equivalent, faces them. But on that September evening, under the new electric lights at Markendale, in the pretty drawing room where two tables had been set out for the house party to play baccarat in the French style, it was easy to think that matters might be easily and conveniently settled and that Sir Ratcliffe would go into the dark quietly.

  The Prince and Sir Ratclifffe were at different tables. Young Ffolliot had been put at the Prince’s table, and those who were to be witnesses were all at Sir Ratcliffe’s. Cobie sat opposite to him. He applied himself to watching Sir Ratcliffe play and to remembering each card that he bet on, checking whether he was still cheating by moving his counters forward or backward in his own favour as he won or lost.

  Sir Ratcliffe was looking both haggard and desperate that night, for all his careful elegance. He had been short with Susanna, even shorter with his wife, who sat by the window, leafing through an old number of The Illustrated London News as though her life depended on it. None of the women had any idea of what was about to happen. For once, their husbands had kept quiet.

  The only wife who was aware that something was about to break, but not what that something was, was Dinah, and she, too, said nothing.

  That Sir Ratcliffe was cheating, and that he had grown both careless and blatant in the doing, was soon not in doubt. The red leather counters, the Prince of Wales’s feathers bright upon them, were distributed, the game began—and Sir Ratcliffe’s pencil at once came into play.

  Cobie, his face sardonic, aware of Hendrick Van Deusen’s eyes on him, could hardly believe that the man could be so contemptuous of them all. Sir Ratcliffe, however, in an attempt to alleviate the pangs of sexual deprivation, had drunk heavily, and was hardly aware of what he was doing. His face was flushed, his hands trembled, so that his cheating became ever more apparent.

  Lord Kenilworth could scarcely believe what he was seeing. A sense of foreboding began to hang over the green baize laid on the table, but the cause of it remained unaware. His last play resulted in a real killing for him, and he triumphantly pushed three extra counters on to his card to secure an even bigger prize.

  The Prince yawned. He had neither won nor lost. He was aware that on the other table, Sir Ratcliffe had won in the game of the evening, but was shortly about to be a loser in the game of life. He had given his courtiers and his friends time to trap the man, and he wanted the distasteful business done with.

  ‘I’m tired,’ he announced. ‘Time for bed, I think. You will attend me in my room, Beauchamp, when you have had your last cigar of the night.’

  This was a euphemism for ‘when you have consulted your fellow conspirators and done what you must,’ for at this point in the evening the Prince had no wish to be overtly aware of what was happening.

  All the players rose and bowed when the Prince and his suite departed. Lord Kenilworth said to Sir Ratcliffe, who was busy collecting his winnings, ‘I wonder if you would care to come to my study, Heneage. A number of us would like to have a word with you.’

  Sir Ratcliffe looked up, his face puzzled. He had long congratulated himself that what he was doing had passed unnoticed. ‘At this hour, Kenilworth? I’m ready for bed. Surprised you aren’t.’

  ‘Not quite ready,’ Kenilworth was short. ‘Now, if you please, Heneage. I don’t want any delay.’

  Sir Ratcliffe, grumbling, followed Kenilworth into his study, to discover Cobie Grant was there, along with a crowd of Sir Ratcliffe’s fellow aristocrats. The mere sight of him raised his hackles.

  ‘I’m not discussing anything with you, Kenilworth, if Grant’s going to be present. I don’t have anything to do with Yankee upstarts.’

  ‘You’ll have to deal with this one, Heneage.’

  Kenilworth was, for once, truculent, not at all his usual charming self. ‘Forgive me, Grant, if I seem to be discourteous,’ he said to Cobie, ‘but the original discourtesy was not mine.’

  Cobie bowed his head. ‘Forgiven,’ he murmured in his best ducal manner.

  ‘Now, you had better do as we wish, Heneage, for your own sake’

  Sir Ratcliffe’s eyes swung from Cobie to Kenilworth and the rest who were all looking at him with hanging judges’ faces. He hesitated, growling ungraciously, ‘Oh, very well.’ He was even more ungracious when he asked to wait in an ante-room for a short time, but thought that it was politic to do as he was bid without further argument.

  He barked at Kenilworth when he was finally called back into the study, ‘Now, tell me what the deuce this is all about that you drag me here at this infernal hour and keep me waiting like a servant.’

  Kenilworth did not ask him to seat himself. He said, his voice and manner grave, ‘I shall come to the point quickly since I find this whole business both distasteful and regrettable. It has been represented to me that you have repeatedly been seen cheating at baccarat, Heneage. Had I received only one complaint, then I might have thought my informants mistaken or deluded.

  ‘Unfortunately, your conduct has become so blatant that more than one person has seen fit to speak to me of it. This evening a group of us decided to watch you, and sadly, it seems from what I have both heard and seen that there is now no doubt as to your guilt.’

  Sir Ratcliffe gave no outward sign of shock. He said, as haughtily as though his innocence was known and provable, ‘I wonder at you, Kenilworth, for bringing such an accusation against a man who is both a friend and a minister of the Crown. I can only suppose that by befriending scum, and inviting it here to Markendale to mix with its betters, you have allowed yourself to lose your powers of judgement. Of course, I have not been cheating. The mere suggestion is absurd.’

  ‘I might have believed you,’ said Kenilworth heavily, ‘had I not seen you repeatedly manipulating your counters with my own eyes. More, every one of us in this room is prepared to testify as to your guilt.’

  Sir Ratcliffe’s face grew ugly. ‘I might have known that anything to do with Grant would be aimed at me. The man has had a down on me ever since we met, God knows why. Dislikes gentlemen, I suppose.’

  Kenilworth closed his eyes in pain. Cobie, watching and listening to him, thought that he had misjudged him in the past: his mild manner plainly hid a steely resolve.

  Now he said, wearily, ‘Grant was not one of those who came to complain to me, Heneage. He only acted as a witness at my request, as did the rest of us here. You must understand the magnitude of the s
candal if your conduct became widely observed and known. It touches the Prince of Wales’s honour that one of his intimates should use his own personal counters to defraud his friends. It is not only your honour which is at stake, it touches all our honour.’

  ‘What, his?’ sneered Sir Ratcliffe, pointing at Cobie. ‘He has none, and I don’t believe you, Kenilworth. You are shielding him. I know that he is behind this.’

  He drew a bow at venture. ‘He stole my diamonds, damn him, I know he did. That man from Scotland Yard thought a guest was the thief—and so he was.’

  A ripple of shock ran round the room. Distaste rode on every face. Only Beauchamp, the grey man, sitting at the back, guarding his master’s reputation, was watching Cobie with more than common interest.

  Cobie said nothing. He left that to the rest. Exclamations of shock and disgust were wrenched from all those present.

  Dagenham exclaimed, ‘That’s monstrous of you, Heneage. Any sympathy I might have felt for you disappears in the face of such a disgraceful accusation. It was quite plain that Inspector Walker’s investigation left us in no doubt that no one at Markendale, either guests or staff, had any part in the regrettable theft of your diamonds. It is a further reflection on your own lack of honour that you defend yourself only by attacking others.’

  ‘I know what I know,’ Sir Ratcliffe said stubbornly, looking round at every accusing face. ‘But I see that you are determined to disgrace me.’

  ‘Now, there you are wrong, Heneage.’ Lord Kenilworth was grave, severe. ‘We want no scandal for the Prince’s sake. We cannot overlook what you have done, for your denials are useless in the face of what we have all seen. What we are prepared to ensure is that your disgrace shall be as little public as possible. If you are willing, for the Prince’s sake, and your own, to set your signature to a document admitting your guilt and promising never to play cards again, then the matter will not go further than this room.