Family Plot Read online

  FAMILY PLOT

  ANOTHER JOHN PICKETT MYSTERY

  FAMILY PLOT

  SHERI COBB SOUTH

  FIVE STAR

  A part of Gale, Cengage Learning

  * * *

  Copyright © 2014 by Sheri Cobb South

  Five Star™ Publishing, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, scanning, digitizing, taping, Web distribution, information networks, or information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The publisher bears no responsibility for the quality of information provided through author or third-party Web sites and does not have any control over, nor assume any responsibility for, information contained in these sites. Providing these sites should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by the publisher of these organizations or of the positions they may take on various issues.

  * * *

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  South, Sheri Cobb.

  Family plot : another John Pickett mystery / Sheri Cobb South. — First edition.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-4328-2963-6 (hardcover) — ISBN 1-4328-2963-7 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4328-2971-1 (ebook) — ISBN 1-4328-2971-8 (ebook)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-2971-1 eISBN-10: 1-4328-2971-8

  1. Police—England—London—Fiction. 2. Aristocracy (Social class)—Fiction. 3. Widows—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.O755F36 2014

  813'.54—dc23 2014020035

  * * *

  First Edition. First Printing: November 2014

  This title is available as an e-book.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-2971-1 ISBN-10: 1-4328-2971-8

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  Visit our website– http://www.gale.cengage.com/fivestar/

  Contact Five Star™ Publishing at [email protected]

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 18 17 16 15 14

  To the talented ladies of the Weekly Writers’ Workshop: Cindy, Cheryl, Phyllis, Shelley, and Mary Jo, and to Beth Taylor, proofreader extraordinaire. Thank you for welcoming this Alabama transplant and making her feel right at home.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  * * *

  Among the questions I am asked about this series, most (aside from the obvious ones about if, when, and how John Pickett and Lady Fieldhurst will ever get together) concern the character of Pickett’s magistrate, Mr. Colquhoun. How, readers want to know, is his name pronounced, and why did I choose to give a character a name so difficult to read? According to Debrett’s Correct Form, the name is pronounced “Ca-HOON.” I chose it because Patrick Colquhoun was a real person who served as a magistrate in London from 1792 to 1818. I confess to fudging my history a bit; my sources place him at the Queen Square Office in Westminster, but I can find no evidence that he ever served in that capacity at the Bow Street Office. Certain aspects of his life, however, dovetail so nicely with that of John Pickett that I hope the reader will forgive me for taking a bit of artistic license.

  PROLOGUE:

  IN WHICH IS PRESENTED AN

  INTERESTING PROPOSAL

  * * *

  The opening night performance was over. The final lines had been uttered, the final curtain rung down, the final bows taken. Celebrated Shakespearean actress Elizabeth Church, clad in the flowing white gown she’d worn for Ophelia’s mad scene, could still hear the crowd’s applause as she navigated the narrow backstage corridor, dodging stagehands and scenery with the ease of long practice. With any luck, the audience’s appreciation would be enthusiastic enough to maintain a lengthy run, staving off the day when she must succumb to the least objectionable of her admirers in order to keep a roof over her head and food in her belly. An actress’s career lasted only as long as her beauty, and as her thirty-third year drew nearer, she could sometimes feel Father Time’s cold hand upon her shoulder.

  She pushed open the door of her dressing room and saw Tilly, the theatre’s maid of all work, waiting inside to help her undress. Closing the door behind her, she turned her back and allowed the little maid to undo the laces and slip the gown over her head.

  “Oh, ma’am,” Tilly breathed as she hung Ophelia’s costume in the clothespress, lovingly caressing the folds of cheap satin. “You were beautiful tonight, just beautiful. No wonder all the gentlemen love you.” Her gaze, more awe-struck than envious, encompassed the half-dozen bouquets of roses scattered about the small room.

  “Hardly ‘all,’ Tilly,” said Mrs. Church. (“Mrs.” being a courtesy title awarded to all actresses of her standing, as there was not, nor had there ever been, a Mr. Church.) She shrugged her arms into the sleeves of her dressing gown and tied it about her trim waist.

  “Enough that you could take your pick, anyways,” Tilly insisted, pouring water from a pitcher into a basin on the dressing table. “Isn’t there one that you could favor? That earl, maybe? He’s a handsome one.”

  “Indeed he is, and I daresay he would worship me madly for at least a month.” Mrs. Church seated herself at the dressing table and bestowed a pitying smile upon the stage-struck maid. How to explain the concerns of three-and-thirty to a buxom lass not yet out of her teens? She turned to the mirror and picked up a cloth, preparing to wash off the heavy theatrical makeup necessary for turning a grown woman into Shakespeare’s virginal heroine. She plunged the cloth into the basin and grimaced. “Cold. Tilly, would you—?”

  “Aye, ma’am, I’ll be back in a trice with hot water.” Suiting the word to the deed, Tilly snatched up the pitcher she’d just emptied and hurried from the room.

  Mrs. Church had to smile at the little maid’s eagerness. Although Tilly had never said as much, she suspected the maid harbored a secret ambition to someday tread the boards herself. She only hoped that, should the opportunity ever present itself, Tilly would not be too disappointed to discover that the reality fell far short of her rosy imaginings.

  To her surprise, the doorknob rattled and in the mirror’s reflection she saw the door swing open. How in the world, she wondered, had Tilly obtained hot water so quickly? “Back so soon?” she asked. “That was—”

  She broke off and stood up abruptly, knocking the chair over in her haste. The door was now fully open, and the figure framed in the doorway was not Tilly, but a tall, willowy gentleman whose form-fitting pantaloons, watered silk waistcoat, and cutaway coat were clearly the work of one of London’s premier tailors.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded, instinctively clutching her dressing gown closed at the neck.

  He advanced a few paces into the room and closed the door behind him. “Never fear, I have no improper designs upon your person—exquisite though it is,” he added, flicking a connoisseur’s gaze over her déshabillé. “In fact, I wish to discuss a rôle which I thought you might find of interest.”

  Whatever she had expected, it was not that. “A rôle?”

  “Picture this, if you will.” He righted the chair she had knocked over, then settled one hip on the corner of the dressing table and made a frame of his hands in an approximation of a scene on the stage. “A picturesque old house on the Scottish coast, where lives a man, old and ill, his last wish only to see the daughter he cast off s
ome fifteen years ago—a daughter, moreover, who bore a striking resemblance to your own fair self.”

  “I see.” Her lips tightened. “You wish me to deceive this man by posing as his long-lost daughter.”

  “ ‘Deceive’ is such a harsh word,” he protested. Seeing her eyebrows rise, he added, “Surely it would be an act of compassion to give this poor old man some comfort in his final days.”

  “And how much compassion did he show his daughter?”

  “Very little, it is true—a circumstance he has come to regret deeply. But a deathbed reconciliation between father and daughter—” He gave a soulful sigh. “—It has a certain Lear-like quality, does it not?”

  “Surely he must see through such a subterfuge,” she observed. “No loving father would fail to know his own child, or to recognize an imposter.”

  “Ah, but he has not seen her in fifteen long years,” he reminded her. “Besides which, the mind has a way of seeing what it wants to see.”

  Her mouth twisted in a wry smile. “Or failing to see what it does not wish to acknowledge.”

  “You would not set out for Scotland at once. You would be well prepared for your rôle in the interim.”

  “And my recompense?”

  “Five thousand pounds sterling.”

  Five thousand pounds. The difference between a comfortable, even luxurious, retirement and a never-ending procession of lovers, wealthy and generous at first, but less so as her beauty began to fade—a dreary sequence that would no doubt end in poverty, prostitution, and disease. It was the specter that haunted all women of her profession, whether they admitted it or not. She drew her chair closer to him and sat down.

  “Tell me more.”

  CHAPTER 1

  IN WHICH AN ACQUAINTANCE

  IS RENEWED

  * * *

  Julia, Lady Fieldhurst, slightly scandalous widow of the recently deceased Viscount Fieldhurst, sat in the family box high above the stage of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, watching the thespians’ performance of Hamlet with mixed emotions. At first she had been gratified (to say nothing of surprised) when the current viscount and the dowager viscountess, mother of her late husband, had arranged this excursion. The Fieldhursts were sticklers for propriety, all the more so for having weathered a recent scandal, and it had, after all, been a scant six months since her husband’s untimely demise.

  “A ball or anything of that sort would naturally be out of the question,” her husband’s cousin, the new Lord Fieldhurst, had added hastily when proposing the outing. “But a dramatic work, suitably sober and uplifting in nature, must surely be unobjectionable.”

  “Needless to say,” interposed the dowager viscountess, with the fixed intention of saying it anyway, “we will not stay for the farce that follows Shakespeare’s tragedy, and we will instruct the footman not to admit visitors to our box. Any display of frivolity would be most inappropriate, given the circumstances.”

  Lady Fieldhurst had wondered at the time why, if they were determined to rob the experience of any pleasure, the Fieldhursts bothered to go out at all. Now, however, as Hamlet declaimed onstage against his mother’s hasty remarriage, she wondered if the evening’s entertainment were intended as less of a social event than a word of warning. Although she had been cleared of any wrongdoing in her husband’s death, his family was still quick to take offense at any perceived slight to the late Lord Fieldhurst’s memory. Still, she wondered how even they might think that, having been unexpectedly released from one unhappy marriage, she would be eager to rush headlong into another.

  In fact, she was more than a little surprised at their willingness to make such a public appearance as the box in Drury Lane while still in mourning. Then again, she had had occasion to learn over the years that the dowager’s notions of propriety, so rigid regarding the behavior of others, were surprisingly elastic where her own wishes were concerned.

  She glanced to her left, where the new Lord Fieldhurst sat with his chin sunk into his cravat, snoring gently. Beyond him, the Dowager Lady Fieldhurst scowled down at the stage, no doubt looking for something to criticize. Not for the first time, the younger Lady Fieldhurst wondered at her own inertia. Why should she linger in London, especially in October? The only members of the beau monde still in residence were members of Parliament and their families, obliged to remain in the Metropolis for the autumn session. It was not as if she had nowhere else to go; whatever else might be said of her husband, he had at least spared her the indignity of being dependent upon his family’s charity. Her widow’s jointure left her comfortably settled, and might even stretch to a modest holiday in Bath or Tunbridge Wells. Yet with the exception of one ill-fated house party in Yorkshire, she had remained in London to face down the scandal surrounding her husband’s death. She knew she would always be welcome in her parents’ home in Somersetshire, but in some aspects even the Fieldhursts’ domineering ways were preferable to the sweet tyranny of a doting father who insisted on treating his twenty-six-year-old daughter as if she were still in the schoolroom.

  Her gaze drifted down to the pit, where those of the lower orders paid two shillings for the privilege of sitting shoulder to shoulder on backless benches throughout the performance. Occasionally her attention was caught by the pale oval of a face as one of the theatre patrons below, a female wearing a hideous purple bonnet, glanced up at her with an expression of mingled envy and resentment. Lady Fieldhurst sighed. She supposed it must seem unfair to the masses below to have the prosperity of the privileged classes on display every time they raised their eyes.

  Still, she wondered if they knew how fortunate they were in having the freedom to live their own lives without regard for the expectations of others. The female in the purple bonnet, for instance, she thought as she pleated the folds of her black satin gown with black-gloved fingers. How lovely it must be to go out in public wearing whatever one wished, without fear of others whispering behind their fans how shocking it was that Lady Fieldhurst had put off her blacks so soon, and after her husband had died in such a way!

  As Hamlet ordered Ophelia to a nunnery on the stage, Lady Fieldhurst played a little game with herself, selecting patrons from the pit at random and weaving life histories for them. The fat man enjoying the performance so boisterously had clearly had too much to drink, and was now postponing the moment when the curtain would fall and he would have to return home to his wife. The dour man in black sitting behind him was obviously collecting material for a scathing sermon on Sunday. The younger man, the one seated between the fat man and the ugly purple bonnet—

  He turned his head slightly, and she stiffened. Was it?—could it be?—yes, she was almost certain. She placed her black-gloved hand on the balustrade and leaned forward for a better look. He glanced up toward her box, a young man with curling brown hair tied back in an old-fashioned queue and a slightly crooked nose, and she was sure. Turning slightly on her chair, she gestured to the footman positioned just outside the box.

  He appeared at her elbow in an instant. “Yes, my lady?”

  She glanced toward her husband’s relations, the sleeping viscount and the distracted dowager. Lady Fieldhurst lifted her chin, her mind made up. “I wish you to deliver a message.”

  “She’s up there, you know.” Lucy, seated in the pit, jerked her sharp chin toward the rows of boxes overhead, where the wealthy and privileged assembled to observe the actors and each other.

  John Pickett looked up, the Prince of Denmark and his troubles forgotten. “Who? Where?”

  “You know who I’m talking about,” Lucy said, adding a disdainful sniff for effect. The dyed ostrich plumes adorning her purple bonnet seemed to wag their feathery heads in disapproval. “That viscountess of yours.”

  “She’s not mine.” Pickett couldn’t quite keep the wistful note out of his voice, and mentally cursed himself for a fool. True, he had saved her from the gallows when it appeared she would be convicted of murdering her husband. They had even kissed once, but that had bee
n purely a matter of expedience: he was investigating a possible murder, and they’d had to have some reason for skulking about in the middle of the night, long after everyone else in the house had gone to bed. He’d never flattered himself by supposing it had left her with a burning desire to repeat the experience. But he hadn’t seen her at all since July, and that had been more than three months ago—three months, one week, and four—stop it, he told himself firmly, fixing his attention on the stage. He had no doubt she had already forgotten the incident; he would be wise to do the same. He wouldn’t look up at the row of boxes overhead—he wouldn’t crane his neck for a glimpse of her—he wouldn’t—

  He looked up when someone tapped him on the shoulder. A liveried footman stood there, his head and shoulders blocking Pickett’s view of the boxes above.

  “Begging your pardon,” the man said, “but the Viscountess Fieldhurst requests that you join her in her box.” He gestured toward the boxes over his shoulder. “If you will follow me?”

  “What, me?” Pickett half-rose from his seat, then froze as the implications became clear. “Here? Now?”

  “Down in front!” shouted a voice from a few rows back.

  “Aye, siddown!” a few more joined in.

  Pickett, caught on the horns of a dilemma, paid them no heed, but addressed himself to the waiting footman. “I—I can’t—I’m not properly dressed—”

  “Very good, sir. Shall I convey your regrets to the lady?”

  “Yes, please.” Then, as the footman began to move away, “No! Wait!”

  “Don’t mind me,” Lucy muttered, pointedly turning her back on Pickett. “After all, I’m nobody!”

  Pickett, stumbling over the legs of the fat man seated at the end of the row, cast an apologetic glance in her direction. “I’m sorry, Lucy. I’ll be back directly.”