A Kiss Across Time: Time Into Time Book Two Read online

  ‘Only with an armed escort and wearing chain mail,’ I said with a shudder. ‘I was groped by dear Prince George last time and I have no desire to meet him again in some shady conservatory.’

  We did some rubber-necking, then strolled up Haymarket. ‘Tell me what was strange about Miss Reece.’

  ‘What she said about Harrogate. There are some excellent shops, a theatre, concert hall, assemblies, tea shops, interesting walks and drives. It is a resort town, even if it is no longer the height of fashion. It is designed for entertainment.’

  ‘Perhaps her elderly relative is infirm and didn’t go out much, or not going to entertainments was part of her punishment for refusing that suitor,’ I suggested.

  ‘Yes, that could be it. But her comments about the weather – it has been unseasonably dry in the North, just as it has down here. My friend with the hunting lodge has mentioned it several times in letters.’

  ‘Certainly strange, although it could simply be a reflection of her mood or she’s fishing for sympathy.’ I shrugged. ‘I can’t see how it could have any bearing on the case unless Talbot or Coates had some connection with the town.’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ James said, as we walked slowly uphill and turned into Piccadilly. ‘We are seeing a mystery in every little discrepancy, I suspect.’

  ‘We need luncheon and a conference,’ I said, stopping outside a pastry shop. ‘And cake for this afternoon.’ No wonder corsets were worn by everyone. With solid Georgian cooking, no sessions down at the dojo and walking everywhere at a ladylike dawdle I was going to need tight lacing myself before much longer.

  We strolled into the Albany with cake boxes dangling by their ribbon bows from our fingers.

  As usual the porters pretended not to see me, but the one at the desk jumped up. ‘Mr Franklin, sir, the second post has just arrived.’

  ‘Thanks Fred, I’ll take it,’ James stopped at the desk while I continued up the path under the pleached limes.

  The front door was wide open. I glanced down to make sure my skirt was clear of the steps and froze. ‘James!’

  He broke into a run. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Blood.’ I was already through the door. ‘Garrick!’

  ‘In here, Miss Lawrence.’

  We followed his voice into the drawing room. Luc was face-down on the chaise, his face turned away from us, the back of his head a bloody mess. From a long way away I heard James swear, violently. I knew that I was cold, ice-cold. I knew that very soon I was going to be racked with grief, but in that moment all I could see was the image of Talbot’s head superimposed on Luc’s, so vivid that I looked around, quite calmly, for the poker. When I discovered who had killed him I was going to need it to kill them.

  Garrick moved in front of me, took me by the shoulders and shook me. ‘He isn’t dead. Cassandra, it is not as bad as it looks.’

  ‘Not dead?’ He let me go and stepped aside and I went down on my knees by the chaise. Luc’s hand dangled over the side and I took it in mine. Warm, the pulse regular. I blinked until my vision had cleared. ‘He’s unconscious?’ I couldn’t have got to my feet, I think someone had disconnected my knee joints.

  ‘What happened?’ James asked from the other side of the couch.

  ‘I heard a thump on the door ten minutes ago, went to see what it was and he was sprawled across the step like that,’ Garrick said. ‘No sign of anyone else and he was bleeding too badly to leave him and go in search of the attacker. I got him inside, then you came.’

  ‘I’ll get a doctor,’ James said.

  ‘No. Not yet.’ My legs sorted themselves out, my stomach returned to where it should be and my anger shuffled off back into a dark corner to await events. ‘Garrick, can you boil water? A strong, rolling boil – and get me fresh linen that’s had a hot iron over it and a bowl. I don’t want a doctor with dirty hands and instruments near him.’

  ‘Should we move him?’ James was on his knees facing me.

  ‘Not until I know what the damage is to his head, but we had better check there aren’t any more wounds. What if he’d been stabbed or shot?’ I slid my hand under Lucian’s torso. ‘Can you check that side, see if you can feel any wetness that might be blood? Or any tears in his clothes.’

  We searched but couldn’t find anything. Lucian’s pulse stayed steady, his breathing seemed normal. I began to let myself hope.

  I scrubbed up as best I could with very hot water and soap and a nail brush, then began to sponge the blood out of Lucian’s hair until I could see the wound. It was about six inches long, a savage split in his scalp that was bleeding with the persistence that head injuries always do. ‘I can’t feel any depression in the skull, nothing moves. The skull isn’t broken where the wound is.’

  ‘No brains on display,’ James said with a laugh that didn’t quite work. ‘Always said he didn’t have any.’

  ‘I heard you,’ Luc said on a breathy whisper.

  ‘James, stop being an ass. Luc, move your fingers, both hands. Good, now your feet.’

  He wasn’t paralysed. I could almost feel my pulse rate steadying. Garrick had hauled him inside without, apparently, thinking of the effect it would have if his spine had been broken or cracked, but we seemed to have got away with that. There was no nose bleed, no blood from the ears. I made a mental note to take the first aid instructor from the police station out to dinner at the earliest opportunity.

  ‘Let me get a pad on this head wound and then we can try sitting you up.’

  Luc, eyes still closed, grunted, and submitted to being bandaged. It took a while but we eventually got him turned over, sitting up and stripped to the waist. There were some nasty bruises where his ribs had met the front door step, a graze on his cheekbone, but no other damage. His pupils were normal and both the same size, the head wound stopped bleeding, he was coherent – and in a foul temper.

  This was not made better by Garrick, also thoroughly scrubbed, checking his skull over again to confirm what I had concluded. Nothing broken.

  ‘But head injuries are tricky,’ Garrick said. ‘You must go to bed and we need to keep waking you at regular intervals for twenty-four hours.’

  Luc snarled, but was over-ridden by his brother. ‘If you want to go to the garden party on Monday you’ll do what you’re told now.’

  ‘Garden party? Are you mad? He isn’t going anywhere. Besides, it isn’t fancy dress is it? We can hardly turn up with Luc looking like an Egyptian mummy.’

  ‘I’ll stitch his head,’ Garrick said, ignoring the filthy look Luc sent him. ‘If I don’t cut his hair we can arrange it over the wound. I believe you take a larger hat size, Mr James? He can borrow one of your hats.’

  I thought they were insane and said so, but it seemed to cheer Luc up and I decided it was better to wait until Sunday to put my foot down. I just wanted him quiet and calm for the moment.

  ‘Who hit you?’ James asked.

  ‘No idea. I heard voices behind me as I came in – sounded like a small group – and then one person’s footsteps on the path, but I didn’t turn. I don’t remember anything else.’

  Garrick came back with a nasty curved needle and thread that he assured me had been boiled and James and I made ourselves scarce. I didn’t much want to watch and I was sure Luc could do without an audience inhibiting his swearing.

  ‘I’ll go and find out if the porters saw who came in after Luc,’ James said. I followed him out and began to search the path from the door to the main building.

  He came back shaking his head. ‘Lord Trelway in the main house seems to have invited his entire acquaintance to view his redecorated apartments. They’ve been coming in since about eleven this morning, all blithely saying Trelway to the porters and finding their own way. It would be easy enough to tag along behind Luc and do the same thing. Whoever it was struck particularly lucky because there were half a dozen of them when he got here.’

  ‘Didn’t they see the assailant going out?’ I was head-down in a lavender bush, rummagi
ng.

  ‘The Trelway visitors are coming and going. Whoever it was could have slipped upstairs, gone out of the front door…’ James broke off as I straightened up, a heavy wooden cosh in my hand. ‘Hell’s teeth,’

  ‘Someone came equipped,’ I said. ‘This isn’t a poker snatched up in a fit of anger. This was intended.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Luc, injured, proved to be hard work. He only agreed to go to bed when I threatened to weep all over him. I’m not sure he believed me, but I managed an adequately trembling lip and curled up beside him, saying it was in order to make sure he stayed put, but actually because I needed a cuddle.

  We had to keep him awake and alert – although what we would have done if he’d had a bleed on the brain, I don’t know. Trepanning, Garrick said when I cornered him in the kitchen. That was no DIY operation, we’d have to call in a doctor and I had little confidence in the outcome if we did, so it was a fairly ghastly twelve hours before we finally let him doze.

  James and I reported on our dancing class and Miss Reece and her views on Harrogate. Luc dismissed it as bravado because she had actually spent the time closeted with great aunt as a punishment. Then I produced the cosh, judging him recovered enough to face the weapon. ‘Definite malice aforethought,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe for a minute that anyone respectable carries something like this and just happened to have a brainstorm at the sight of you, whipped it out and thumped you. You were being stalked.’

  Luc picked up the heavy baton and weighed it in his hand. ‘There is a lead core in here. This is the first positive thing that has happened.’

  ‘Positive? Someone tried to kill you and you call it positive?’

  ‘It means we’re getting somewhere, otherwise, why take the risk?’

  ‘True.’ Garrick came in with a cup of tea. ‘Drink that.’

  ‘I want claret. It’s at least six o’clock.’

  ‘No alcohol,’ we chorused.

  ‘And stop thinking about the murder,’ I added. ‘You’ll get brain fever.’

  ‘Do you want me to open your post?’ James asked. Luc nodded, winced and pushed away the tea. I pushed it back.

  ‘Invitation, invitation, tailor’s bill, letter from the steward at Whitebeams.’ James scanned down the three sheets. ‘Just a report, nothing urgent. Another invitation. Ah, Mama’s handwriting.’ He slit the seal and unfolded two pages. ‘Oh, bloody hell.’

  Luc sat up with a jerk. ‘The boys?’ I pushed him down, he resisted.

  ‘No, everyone’s absolutely fine. But our dear Mama intends to descend on London next Wednesday, bringing the twins, and to stay for at least a month.’

  We stared at each other. ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ I echoed. ‘What are we going to tell her about me?’ Then I looked at Luc’s bandaged head. ‘No, forget I said that. I’m not important. What about the fact that at least one person intending you deadly harm is loose in London and your mother and two small sons are about to arrive? How are we going to protect them?’

  ‘Tell her she can’t come,’ James said as his brother finally yielded to my pushing and lay flat again. ‘Tell her that the ceiling of the principal floor at the Town house has collapsed after a water leak.’

  ‘Say James has mumps – she won’t want to risk the boys getting that.’

  ‘He’s had mumps,’ Lucian said. ‘When he was about three. And if she thinks the Town house will need redecorating she’ll descend, stay in a hotel and expect to supervise.’

  ‘Well, think of something,’ I said. ‘Or are you going to tell her that you’re having an affair with a time traveller from the twenty-first century and that someone is trying to kill you?’

  ‘Or simply tell her about the danger, then Lady Radcliffe will stay safely where she is,’ Garrick suggested.

  ‘She’ll worry herself to flinders,’ James objected.

  ‘Better worried than in danger,’ I said. ‘And what about the children?’

  ‘You’re right,’ Luc said, staring up at the ceiling, held flat by my hand on his breastbone. ‘James, you write now – she’ll take it more seriously if she thinks I can’t manage a letter – but for God’s sake, don’t let her think I’m at death’s door. Then if it goes express it will be in time to stop her.’

  I felt Luc’s pulse, which was amazingly steady under the circumstances. If the situation was reversed and my mother was about to descend on us I would be hyperventilating. I peered at his eyes which were still focused and normal and began to believe that he was going to be all right.

  Eventually Garrick went to interrogate the porters, make a list of everyone they recognised and gather descriptions, however vague, of everyone they didn’t. ‘Not that it helps much,’ he said when he got back. ‘Anyone could have slipped in and out unseen and there is no-one on this list who we have considered suspicious.’

  ‘In fact the only person even remotely connected with all this who has an alibi is Miss Reece,’ I said, staring at the incident boards. In the interests of keeping Luc awake we’d shifted them into his bed chamber. ‘She was at the dancing class with us.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be someone named on there.’ Luc was propped up now as he seemed more likely to keep still if he could see what was going on. ‘If I was behind this I’d employ someone, dress them up to look respectable and have them follow me looking for an opportunity to use that cosh. They must have had strong nerves to follow me into Albany and do it on my doorstep, which argues a professional.’

  ‘Or someone desperate,’ I said. ‘Did you get to see your enquiry agent?’

  ‘Yes.’ He frowned with the effort of getting his, presumably badly aching, brain to recall the detail. ‘Essentially Dettmer is exactly what he says he is. Came over here with letters of recommendation, works hard, exchanges information about Continental practice in return for insights into pianoforte-making over here, always in on time. Mrs Kentish reports no visitors. If he’s up to something then it doesn’t involve odd hours, secretive behaviour or mysterious visitors.’

  He broke off to drink from the mug of broth Garrick had made. ‘This is good. What is next?’

  ‘That’s it,’ I told him. ‘Good nourishing beef broth with veggies. You can have steak tomorrow. What about your solicitors and the Count?’

  ‘He came over in late ’93 at the height of the Terror. He was absorbed into the French émigré community, got intermittent work teaching French then fell in with someone who had influence at the Home Office and secured the translating post. Nothing known against him, all the established French aristocrats who’ve encountered him say he’s the real Count – spitting image of his father and so forth. Another dead end.’

  I still wasn’t so sure. Some instinct was telling me that Gaston de Saint Clément might be just who he said he was, but that he was up to something. ‘I’ll move Herr Dettmer to the bottom of the board and mark him Probably Innocent, but I’m still not convinced about dear Gaston.’

  The others looked unimpressed by my instincts. We took it in turns to eat dinner away from Luc so as not to drive him to rebellion. James and Garrick read the day’s papers to him and I tabulated the names from the ledgers that Garrick had finished.

  ‘Talbot doesn’t seem to have used any codes to mark problem patients, more’s the pity. If he noted jealous husbands and flirtatious ladies putting their hand on his stethoscope it would have helped,’ I grumbled. I didn’t feel any wiser by the time I had finished, only amazed at the status of Talbot’s patients.

  By midnight we had talked ourselves to a standstill and Luc looked exhausted. But his eyes were still normal, there was no bleeding anywhere and I agreed it was safe to let him sleep.

  ‘Stay,’ he said. James had gone to bed down in the drawing room having promised that he wouldn’t try walking home alone at that time of night with the cosh-wielder at large and Garrick was heating water for Luc to wash.

  ‘Very well,’ I said. I had been determined to do so in any case, so I could sit up and keep an eye o
n him, but I sneakily thought it would be best if he thought it was his idea.

  ‘And sleep,’ he said and I realised I wasn’t fooling him at all.

  We spent Saturday studiously avoiding anything that might stop Luc resting. He slept, ate like a horse and slept some more and by Sunday he was behaving as though nothing had happened. I couldn’t work out whether he was in agony but Georgian male pride simply wouldn’t allow him to admit it, or whether the tolerance of pain was higher in those days. I recalled reading about someone at Waterloo who was wounded, unhorsed, ridden over by two cavalry charges, used as a shooting platform by French troops, stuck by a lancer and who still survived and was very laid-back about the entire experience.

  Garrick was full of admiration for the way the wound was healing cleanly and was a complete convert to the sterile theory, so at least I had some confidence that if any of them got hurt while I was back in my own time they would take the right precautions.

  There was swelling of course, and a nasty line of stitches, but when Garrick cautiously washed Luc’s hair we found we could comb it to almost cover the damage. ‘That will do under a hat, provided we can pad the rim so it doesn’t chafe, but you can’t go to the ball in a hat,’ he said.

  ‘Egg white,’ I suggested. ‘Whip it up stiffly, then comb it in, position the hair and it will dry in place.’ They looked dubious, but I thought it would work.

  Garrick and I spent an hour on Sunday morning sorting out my gowns for the garden party and for the ball in the evening, then I sat down with the Annual Kalendar and cross-referenced the employees of the Home Office against the names Garrick had extracted from the porters.

  ‘There are names that match,’ I said. ‘The porters recognised a Mr Potter and a Mr Albright who came in together and there are two clerks listed – Mr J. Potter and Mr A. Albright. And they saw a Mr Reece – could that be Sir Thomas’s nephew Elliott?’

  ‘Damn, I should have noticed the name,’ Garrick said. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Lawrence, my language – ’