The Hazardous Measure of Love: Time Into Time Book Five Page 2

  ‘OK, fair enough.’ He grinned. ‘If you ever change your mind, mine is very open. This is Welhampstead, after all,’ he added mysteriously. Then he was gone before I had a chance to reply.

  Did he mean what I thought he meant – that he guessed time travel was involved? But Luc’s letter was waiting and I opened it, scattering dried-out sealing wax everywhere.

  Dearest Cassie,

  I arrived home safely, but almost an hour later than I left. I intend trying again in a few days, but I will talk to Mama about it first – it is neither fair nor safe to do this without her understanding what is happening.

  I look forward to…

  * * *

  Yes, well, that is all you need to know. But what Luc was looking forward to reminded me to check out the private clinic that Sophie had told me about and, when he appeared with a bump on the sofa three days later, I suggested he go for a check-up, although I have to admit, that was not the first thing we did.

  Being a typical male faced with a visit to the doctor, he grumbled and prevaricated but, when I pointed out that we could get rid of the condoms, he brightened up. We made an appointment for the next day and did all the forms on-line, then went out shopping for trainers. Pulling off a pair of Hoby’s best handmade boots created some considerable interest in Mellow’s, where I thought the shoe salesman was going to expire from boot envy.

  Luc went off for his appointment, primed by me with what to expect in the way of blood tests, blood pressure readings, female medics and deeply personal questions, and came back looking smug.

  Everything they could tell him about without waiting for test results was excellent, he informed me. ‘Apparently I am a fine physical specimen.’

  I had to agree, but even so, I told him not to be too smug until we got the results. They came through two days later and Luc pronounced himself fully entitled to be smug. I thought so too.

  * * *

  At breakfast the next morning we discussed what he would most like to do, or see, in my time.

  ‘London?’ I suggested. ‘Or would you like to wander about locally a bit and get used to things? London can be a bit full-on – Luc?’

  ‘I need to go back,’ he said, frowning. ‘It isn’t the family, I think.’ He thumped his fist on the table in frustration. ‘Damn it, I am not used to this, I cannot interpret what is happening.’

  ‘Go,’ I said, pushing back my chair and heading for the bedroom. ‘I’ll change into my nineteenth century clothes and, when you get there, think hard about me and I will try and follow.’

  I turned back, saw him shimmer as he held the case with the pictures, then he was gone. I pulled out the clothes I had been wearing when I shifted back the last time and struggled into them, muttering with frustration at tapes and corset strings. Then I grabbed my bag, stuffed in the packet of pills from the bedside table, and ran back to where the portrait miniature of Luc hung on the wall at a cat-proof height.

  The little picture was already warming when I laid my hand on it and that was the signal that it was almost ready to pitch me back in time. I held tight to my bag and braced myself.

  The brightly-lit room faded to black, I was spun around into the usual violent, rushing, wind, then I landed with a thud on something that said, ‘Ough!’ but grappled me firmly into a competent masculine embrace before we crashed to the ground.

  Chapter Two

  Luc? No, when I opened my eyes I found myself staring into the amused green gaze of his younger brother James.

  Once my head had stopped spinning I removed my elbow from James’s stomach and sat up to find that we were sprawled on the terrace at the rear of Luc’s London house in St James’s Square. Fortunately there was no one else about.

  James, who looks very like Luc, except that he is blond and Luc is dark, is one of my favourite people, the brother I never had. He is also gay, not a safe thing to be at that time. Fortunately he had settled happily on the Leicestershire estate of his elderly godfather, whose heir he is, along with his partner, Christopher Lyle, the old man’s secretary.

  ‘James!’ I hugged him, then we staggered to our feet and brushed ourselves down. ‘What are you doing in London? Not that I’m not thrilled to see you.’

  ‘Business for my godfather, a chance to see the family and we need to pay visits to our tailors and bootmakers,’ he explained. ‘Luc is in the drawing room. He tells me he has visited your time – and I want some of those shoes he was wearing when he came back.’

  ‘Well, you can’t have any,’ I told him briskly, imagining the arrival of designer trainers in nineteenth century London. ‘Luc should have changed before he returned. When did he arrive and what is the date?’

  ‘He appeared an hour ago, just before nine o’clock. Today is Sunday the twenty eighth of June. Mama has just left for church and the twins are out with their nanny in the park. Kit is here too,’ he added warningly.

  That was Christopher Lyle, who did not know where and when I came from, only that I was a female friend of the family from America. He probably wondered at the amount of freedom I had, despite being a single woman, but no one had enlightened him and he was too polite to ask.

  ‘What about Garrick and Carola?’

  ‘They are visiting his sister and her family in Greenwich,’ James said.

  Garrick and his wife live in their own apartment on the third floor. He is Luc’s best friend, had been his most unconventional valet, and was now his confidential agent, business manager and, when required, family bodyguard. They too were in on my secret.

  ‘It is wonderful to be here,’ I said, following him from the terrace into the breakfast room. ‘But what is wrong? Something called Luc back.’

  ‘Murder,’ James said grimly.

  Unfortunately, I tend to find myself back in Luc’s time when there is some mystery to be solved and, interesting as it was, I was beginning to wish that I could just spend a peaceful few weeks absorbing the Georgian world. ‘Who?’ It was a worry because it was always something that impacted on Luc personally.

  ‘Adrien Prescott,’ James said as we emerged into the hallway. ‘No, it is all right,’ he added hastily as I gasped. ‘He isn’t the one who is dead, but he came to us for help. It is his employer who has been murdered – and only three houses from here. Prescott arrived just over an hour ago, closely followed by Luc who fortunately materialised, or whatever the word is, in his own dressing room. He sent me to watch for you.’

  Until recently Adrien had been the twins’ temporary tutor – or manny as I insisted on calling him, to Luc’s horror. The boys are really much too young for a tutor, but they had needed someone young and tough who wouldn’t buckle under their exuberant energy and could take the strain off their grandmother and rather elderly nanny.

  Adrien had become involved in our last, very messy, mystery. He had even been a murder suspect at one point, until it emerged that his suspicious behaviour was down to his apparently hopeless love for Miss Rowena McNeil, the daughter of an exceedingly well-off East India Company nabob. He had left Luc’s employ about a month ago to take up the position of secretary to his cousin, who had just inherited a title. Adrien had political ambitions and hoped that he would make valuable contacts, as well as eventually earning enough to support Rowena.

  ‘They are in Luc’s study,’ James said. ‘Before we go in, I’ll tell you what I know. The dead man is Viscount Tillingham, Prescott’s cousin and employer. Prescott came in to work this morning, which he wouldn’t normally do, it being Sunday, and found him cold and dead on the floor behind his desk, apparently knifed in the chest.’

  ‘Cold? Surely the staff had missed the Viscount if he had been dead that long in his own home?’

  ‘Tillingham was working on a speech to the House of Lords and, when he was in the throes, as it were, he did not like to be disturbed, but used a campaign bed set up in the corner of the study. The butler had a quick look first thing this morning, saw the bed was undisturbed, could not see his employer, who wa
s hidden by the desk, and concluded that he must have gone out for an early walk after working through the night.’

  James opened the door of the study for me. ‘Miss Lawrence has arrived, Luc.’

  Both the men who had been standing by the desk looked round and Luc came across and kissed my hand. ‘Not the welcome I would have hoped for you, Cassandra. Our friend Adrien has just made a most unpleasant discovery.’

  Adrien was as gangling, tall and mousey as I remembered him, which was not surprising as it was scarcely a month in his time since we had last met. But he was also subdued and pale, not the energetic, enthusiastic young man I had come to know and like.

  ‘James told me.’ I held out my hand and shook his. ‘I am sorry to meet you again at such a difficult time.’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘My poor cousin.’

  I wondered how long it would take before he realised that, with his employer’s death, his first foothold on the ladder of a successful political career had been knocked away, and with it his hopes for securing Rowena McNeil’s hand. Here at least, I thought, was someone with good reason for wishing his cousin a long and healthy life.

  ‘Now that you and James have joined us, I should summarise before we go around to Tillingham’s house to make certain I have the facts correct,’ Luc said. ‘He was working on a speech on the subject of the taxation of food imports.’ He looked at Adrien who nodded. ‘His staff knew not to disturb him and were not alarmed at his absence from his bed in the morning. The butler was puzzled when he could not see him in the study, but was not unduly concerned, even then.’

  ‘I learned very quickly that Cousin Henry was very rigid in his work routines,’ Adrien said. ‘And the staff were trained not to disturb him. If I had not called to bring some statistics that I had been gathering for him, I do not know when he might have been discovered. Perhaps not until it was time for luncheon. It was his habit to attend Evensong, not Matins.’

  ‘So, you went to the study to leave the figures and found him?’ I asked. ‘How could you see him when the butler did not?’

  ‘I noticed that the papers on his side of the desk were not quite tidy, which is most unlike my cousin. The desk is very wide, the kind they call a partners’ desk with drawers on both sides. I would work on one side and he on the other, so it was not until I walked right around it that I saw him lying on the floor between the desk and the chair.’ Adrien had become even paler. ‘I did not see the blood at first and I thought he had fainted and perhaps hit his head, but then the side of his coat fell back when I tried to lift him and I found my hand was red…’

  ‘What did you do next?’ Luc was brisk and the tone had its effect on the younger man.

  ‘I realised he was cold. There was no pulse and the blood was not flowing. He was clearly dead and I did not think the body should be disturbed, so I called Grainger, the butler, and left him on guard outside the study while I came for you, sir. I knew you would see things that would be missed if I let the doctor and the constable loose in the room first.’

  ‘It appears I have an unfortunate reputation for dealing with murders,’ Luc said, his smile wry. ‘Very well. We will come and inspect the study and the body and then you must summon the doctor and inform the nearest magistrate.’

  I remembered to ring for a maid to fetch my bonnet from the store of clothes I left at both the Town and the country houses. Ladies inspecting corpses was bad enough, but without bonnet and gloves it would be a scandal, as I remarked to James, who almost had a fit of unseemly laughter.

  Viscount Tillingham’s house was virtually next door but, as all the houses in the Square were built individually, it was arranged differently inside from Luc’s. However, the study was in much the same position, with a view over the small back garden. The window was the kind that reached down almost to the ground and the sash could be raised so that it was possible to step out directly onto the terrace.

  ‘Was the window closed?’ Luc asked as we entered past a grey-faced butler. The desk was set in front of the glass with the chair’s back to it and with about three feet of clear space between curtains and chair legs.

  ‘It is just ajar. I did not touch it.’ Adrien edged around the back of the chair, clearly trying not to look down, and peered at the catch. ‘It is completely unlatched. It was warm last night, I thought.’ James nodded agreement. ‘My cousin would often work with the window open, even in the winter – he was a great proponent of fresh air.’ He shuffled back to us. ‘He’s… You can observe that the body is not visible from here.’

  Luc walked around the desk and looked down, his expression grim. James followed and stood at his shoulder, but I went around the other side and, as Luc knelt, I did too.

  ‘He seems completely rigid,’ I observed, summoning up all my Special Constable training to try and study the body dispassionately – and yes, that is every bit as difficult as it sounds. ‘But all we can really deduce from that is that it is probably at least twelve hours since death.’

  I sat back on my heels and studied the way the body lay. ‘There are so many variables – the temperature, his health and so forth – but I suppose we can be fairly certain he was killed not long before, or just after, midnight. It does not look as though he was moved after rigor began to set in. The way he is lying seems perfectly natural, as if he was standing at the desk and simply slumped down.’

  I met Luc’s gaze, saw his agreement, and thought how good it felt to be working with him like this. If only the cause was not so grim…

  * * *

  Luc gingerly turned back the sides of the Viscount’s evening coat to expose a blood stain across the left breast of the pale blue silk waistcoat. ‘Stabbed or shot in the heart by the look of it. Stabbed, I would assume, as the waistcoat seems intact and I can see no powder marks.’ He took an ivory page-turner from the desk and gingerly probed the silk. ‘There’s a slit here, I think, although the blood is so thickly clotted…’ He broke off.

  ‘A shot would have roused the household,’ James observed, looking more than a trifle green.

  ‘You would think so, but if all the staff were downstairs… Still, this looks like a stab wound to me.’ He lifted the man’s arms as best he could and studied the hands, which were clenched. ‘Can’t tell if he was holding anything until the stiffness wears off.’

  Luc stood up and looked around the room. ‘Prescott, can you see if anything is misplaced, or if there is anything here you do not recognise?’

  I stood too, as Adrien began a slow, careful scrutiny of the study, then checked the papers on the desk. ‘I can see nothing missing, moved or unusual,’ he said, after laying the paperwork back as he had found it. ‘Those papers look as though he disturbed them slightly standing up, that is all.’

  ‘Then we had best send for the magistrate, the constable and the doctor, or the delay will seem very strange.’

  ‘Where is the paperknife?’ I asked, scanning the floor around me. In my experience every desk at this time had a paperknife for slitting seals and cutting the pages of new books and some of them had struck me as lethally dangerous.

  ‘It should be in here.’ Adrien opened the small top drawer on the right-hand side and lifted out a slender ivory blade with a silver handle.

  I took it from him and peered closely. ‘It is completely dry and I can see no sign of blood at all. Unlike a metal blade the ivory would, surely, have trapped some in the tiny indentations. Does it always live in there?’

  Adrien nodded. ‘Cousin Henry disliked having anything cluttering up the working surface.’

  ‘A pity. That would have been useful, to identify the weapon so early,’ Luc said. He tested it with his finger. ‘No, that’s not sharp enough. In the absence of anything immediately obvious, I suggest we interview the butler before anyone else does and he begins to elaborate on his story.’

  James nodded. ‘And adds things he did not actually recall.’

  Footmen were despatched with messages to the various officials and we
steered the butler into the front room.

  ‘Grainger, is it not?’ Luc asked.

  ‘Yes, my lord.’ He stood in front of us, pale-faced and looking as anxious as might be expected of someone whose employer was lying murdered in the next room.

  ‘How long have you been with the household?’

  ‘I have been with Lord Tillingham for just over a year,’ he said, readily enough. ‘Ever since he inherited the title, that is. I was his late father’s first footman and his lordship most kindly offered me the post when Mr Claridge, the previous butler, wished to retire.’

  That burst of explanation seemed to have exhausted him and he stood staring blankly over Luc’s shoulder.

  ‘The Viscount was an easy man to work for?’ I asked and he jumped, as though he had forgotten my presence.

  ‘Yes, ma’am. In his way. He was always clear about what he expected and his standards were high. Firm but fair, you could say. Never any shows of temper. I would describe him as very even in his mood.’ He paused and I could see he was chewing the inside of his cheek as though trying to control something that wanted to be said.

  ‘Go on,’ I encouraged. ‘Anything you can tell us will be helpful in catching Lord Tillingham’s murderer.’

  ‘He had no humour about him,’ Grainger said slowly, as though trying to analyse his late employer for the first time.

  ‘Ponderous?’ Luc suggested.

  ‘That would be the word, my lord. Everything had to be just so and if it were not, he would explain, very calmly, how things should be.’ He hesitated, as though recalling something. ‘Even if someone became agitated and spoke loudly, he would answer very evenly, but firm-like. One knew where one was with him, I must say,’ he added, with the air of a man grasping at something positive to say.