Peril by Post Read online

  “Poor John! And so you shall be obliged to attend a ball, after all! Unless you don’t like to—”

  “No, no,” he lied gallantly, hoping for something, anything, to occur that might spare him the ordeal.

  He could not have guessed with what irony this hope would very nearly be fulfilled.

  3

  In Which a Pleasant Outing Takes a Tragic Turn

  DESCENDING THE STAIRS to inquire after the promised basket, Pickett found the space behind the counter empty; Ned Hawkins had apparently abandoned his post. Now that Pickett thought of it, he didn’t remember seeing the man when he’d returned from calling on Robert Hetherington, either. He glanced about the public room (not so busy now as it had been when he and Julia had arrived the day before), but saw no sign of the innkeeper among the few patrons.

  A noise behind him made Pickett turn just in time to see the pretty young barmaid emerge from a back room, eyes flashing and cheeks flushed with some strong emotion.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said, twisting her apron in her hands. “Can I help you?”

  “I was looking for Mr. Hawkins,” Pickett said.

  “Papa’s gone out.”

  “So I see. May I talk to your mother, then?”

  “She’s not my mother, only a ‘step’! And if you want to talk to her, you’re welcome to her, for I’m sure I have nothing to say to her!” She flounced away with a swirl of skirts, and paused at the door through which she had come. “Well? Are you coming to talk to Stepmama or not?”

  Pickett muttered something halfway between a thank-you and an apology, and followed her through the door that led into a kitchen.

  “Someone wants to talk to you,” the girl curtly informed her stepmother, a woman in her forties who stood before a scarred deal table, stirring something in a large bowl.

  Pickett had assumed the girl would beat a hasty retreat, wanting as little to do with her stepmother as possible, but to his considerable surprise, she took up a perch on a nearby stool and, in spite of her avowed reluctance to speak to this maternal surrogate, apparently picked up the threads of the conversation he’d interrupted, announcing, “Percival wants me to be his Muse!”

  “I suppose that’s one word for it, but I could give you another,” said the woman, clearly unimpressed with this plan for her stepdaughter’s future. “Now hush, Lizzie, and let the gentleman talk.”

  Pickett, equally flustered by finding himself in the middle of a mother-daughter quarrel—rather, a stepmother-stepdaughter quarrel, as he was sure Lizzie would have been quick to point out—and hearing himself described (quite erroneously) as a gentleman, stammered, “I only wanted to ask—I wondered if—your husband said you might be willing to—”

  “My husband?” she asked sharply. “Is Ned back already, then? Mayhap he can talk some sense into this foolish girl of his, for I’m sure I can’t!”

  “No, I’m afraid not. Er, that is, I haven’t seen him today,” Pickett amended hastily, not wanting to cast aspersions on Lizzie’s intelligence. “But when my wife and I arrived yesterday, your husband suggested you might be willing to make up a basket, should we wish for a picnic.”

  “Percival took me on a picnic last week,” Lizzie said with a reminiscent sigh. “He spread a blanket on the ground, and after we’d eaten, he read me the poem he’d written about me. And then he suggested we lie down on the blanket and rest a bit, but I’m not such a fool as that! I told him I had chores to do, and I’d better come back home.”

  “About this basket—” Pickett put in.

  “Aye, you’ll come home by Weeping Cross if you’re not careful, my girl,” the older woman said, wagging the spoon at her stepdaughter.

  “I’m not your girl—Percival says I’m his! His poem called me”—her face assumed a beatific expression, and she recited soulfully—“ ‘thou shy lady’s slipper fit to clothe the naked feet of a goddess, that is to say, thine own.’ ”

  “He called you a shoe?” asked Pickett, momentarily distracted from his purpose.

  “It’s a flower,” she explained contemptuously, as if anyone with the slightest claim to intelligence, to say nothing of artistic sensibility, would have known this. “That’s just the way poets talk.”

  “And how does he know what your naked feet look like, I’d like to know?” asked her stepmother, eyes narrowed in sudden suspicion.

  “If Papa likes Percival, I don’t see that you have any right to object!”

  “Speaking of Mr. Hawkins,” Pickett said, trying again, “he told me you might—”

  “Your papa likes the money that fellow is paying to stay here while he writes his wretched verse, but as for letting some rhymester give his daughter a slip on the shoulder, well, you’ll find he holds a very different opinion there.” She cast a fretful glance toward the door. “Can’t imagine what’s keeping him so long. I wish he’d come back.”

  “So do I!” Lizzie cried hotly. “Then he’d tell you—but no, you’d rather I married Ben Wilson and—and spent the rest of my days as a—a farm wife!”

  “And how you think that would be a worse fate than being some poet’s fancy-piece, I’m sure I don’t know,” Mrs. Hawkins retorted. “Ben Wilson farms his own land, and that’s nothing to cock a snoot at. You could do a lot worse for yourself.”

  Pickett, feeling he was rapidly losing control of the conversation (if in fact he’d ever had any control of it at all) decided it was time to remind the women of his presence. “Er, about this basket,” he said, “I would be glad to pay you something for your trouble—”

  Perhaps it was the mention of money that did the trick. Whatever the reason, Mrs. Hawkins was instantly recalled to her duty. “Oh, I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” she assured him, although her tone suggested that, were he to insist, she would allow herself to be persuaded to accept. “I’ve a bit of chicken left from last night’s dinner I could give you, or there’ll likely be roast mutton after tonight. When was you wanting it?”

  “This afternoon, if possible.”

  “Chicken it is, then, if that’s agreeable.”

  “Quite agreeable,” Pickett said and after promising to pick up the basket on their way out, left the women to debate uninterrupted the relative virtues of farmers versus poets.

  He reached his own room to discover that Julia had changed her morning gown for a walking dress topped with a spencer of gold lutestring, and traded her soft kid shoes for a pair of sturdy jean half-boots.

  “Very nice,” Pickett said, eyeing his well-dressed bride appreciatively. “Have I seen this before?”

  “No, for it came from the dressmaker only a few days before we left London,” Julia said, then added contritely, “I should not have ordered it, of course, but I didn’t yet know about the baby, and by the time I found out, it was too late to cancel the order.” She tied the ribbons of a matching bonnet over her golden tresses, and Pickett no longer wondered at the number of bags she had deemed necessary for the journey.

  Still, he could not argue with the results. They left the room and locked the door behind them, then descended the stairs to the kitchen, where they found Mrs. Hawkins waiting for them with the promised basket and a woolen blanket which she insisted they take with them.

  “For Mrs. Pickett won’t want her pretty dress spoiled by grass stains,” she explained, leading Pickett to wonder exactly what the woman thought they would be doing on this picnic. Given Lizzie’s recollections of her picnic with her poet, he could hazard a reasonably accurate guess. He didn’t bother to disabuse her of this notion, but tucked the blanket under one arm and hefted the basket with the other, and they left the inn.

  “Oh!” Julia exclaimed when Pickett would have circled the building in search of the path Ned Hawkins had indicated. “We were going to sign the subscription book at the Golden Feather!”

  “How could I forget?” Pickett wondered with a marked lack of enthusiasm.

  They crossed the road and entered the rival establishment. Unlike the Hart a
nd Hound, which boasted a broad yard in front where carriages might disgorge their passengers and take up new ones (and did, as Pickett had already discovered, at all hours of the day, making him doubly thankful for a room at the rear of the building), the Golden Feather sat flush against the road, with no more than a three-foot pavement between its front door and the High Street.

  Still, it soon became apparent that this inn offered amenities which Ned Hawkins would be hard-pressed to duplicate. Its entry was wainscoted in rich linenfold paneling that an eye more knowledgeable than Pickett’s would have readily identified as oak, and cornices of egg-and-dart molding traced the perimeter of its plastered ceiling. Directly opposite the front door, access to the upper floors was provided by means of a curved staircase whose elaborately carved banister was polished to a sheen and scented faintly of beeswax. Pickett felt a pang of regret that his instructions had specified the Hart and Hound; it seemed to him that its competitor was more deserving of his lady wife’s patronage. Then again, his anonymous correspondent might have assumed that the Golden Feather would have been above a Bow Street Runner’s touch; a scant three months earlier, it would certainly have been above his own.

  All these observations passed through his brain in less time than it took Julia to step up to the counter and ask for the proprietor. The man at the counter, a fellow as gaunt as their own host was stout, identified himself as Mr. Jedidiah Tyson, and subjected the Picketts to just such an appraising look as the one they had endured from Ned Hawkins upon their arrival at the Hart and Hound.

  “Ah! Welcome to the Golden Feather,” he said in an ingratiating tone, having apparently arrived at the same conclusion as had their own host. “What may I do for you? You’ll require a room, yes?”

  “No, thank you,” Julia said. “We’re staying at the Hart and Hound across the street. But we were told that you host assemblies here every Wednesday, and we should like to sign the subscription book, if we may.”

  “Of course, of course!” In anticipation of filling one of his establishment’s rooms, Mr. Jedidiah Tyson had already been withdrawing the inn’s registry from beneath the counter. If he was at all disappointed by the realization that he was mistaken in this assumption, he didn’t show it; he merely shoved the registry back into place and left his position behind the counter, waving a hand toward the grand staircase. “If you will follow me?”

  This they did, and soon found themselves in a room on the floor directly above, a large room boasting a raised dais at one end, yet devoid of furnishings save for a lectern positioned just inside the door and a dozen or so straight chairs ranged along the walls. Pickett viewed them with the lowering conviction that, should the letter prove to be of sufficient importance to require his continued presence in Banfell, it would be his fate to occupy one of these chairs for the better part of every Wednesday evening until they returned to London. Mr. Tyson reached behind the lectern to extract a second registry from the shelf built into it.

  “We also host the occasional improving lecture or poetry reading, but these are not as popular as the assemblies,” Tyson said, apparently feeling some explanation was called for as to the presence a lectern in a room set aside for dancing. He flipped through page after page of signatures until he found the one he sought, the first one with blank lines. “Ah, here we are! Tickets for this week’s assembly are half a guinea each.”

  Pickett, seeing his duty clear, set the basket down and fumbled in his pocket for the necessary coin while Julia wrote “Mr. and Mrs. John Pickett” on the line Mr. Tyson indicated—an operation which the ambitious innkeeper observed with delight, rubbing his hands together in glee at the prospect of stealing well-born patrons (one well-born patron, anyway) from his rival across the street, if only for one evening.

  “The dancing commences promptly at eight, and ends on the stroke of midnight,” Tyson informed them, then cast a sidelong look at Pickett. “Of course, if it should happen that the gentleman partakes a bit too freely from cellars that are held to be excellent—though I say it as shouldn’t—I always keep a few guest rooms vacant for just such an eventuality.”

  “You have to hand it to him, really,” Pickett told Julia after they had left the Golden Feather and set out along the path Ned Hawkins had pointed out from their window the previous day. “The Hart and Hound gets its custom from the mail coaches and the stage from Penrith, so Tyson has found a way to attract patrons to his own place, right under Mr. Hawkins’s nose. Still, I don’t think I’ll drink whatever happens to be on offer from his cellars, no matter how ‘excellent’ they’re held to be.”

  “Oh?” Julia asked. “You’re not thinking of Lady Washbourn’s peach ratafia, are you?”

  “No,” he said, shuddering a little at the memory of his last case and the toll it had very nearly taken on his marriage. “But our friend Tyson was a bit too quick to mention those conveniently reserved rooms. While I have no reason to suspect him of wanting to poison the Hart and Hound’s patrons, I wouldn’t put it past him to slip something into the drinks that would incapacitate them just long enough to oblige them to spend the night.”

  “Very well then, we shall delay the satisfaction of any need for liquid refreshment until we return to the Hart and Hound,” Julia conceded. “Speaking of which, I don’t think we should mention the poetry readings to Lizzie’s poet, do you?”

  “No, but a word in Ned Hawkins’s ear might not go amiss. He might want to mention them to the fellow himself.”

  Julia nodded sagely. “Judging the loss of the poet’s custom a small price to pay for the preservation of his daughter’s virtue. Yes, I see your point.”

  The village of Banfell was situated in a long, narrow valley, with Ban Lake at its southern end and the River Ban marking its eastern boundary. The footpath they now followed curved around a stand of trees and out of sight of the inn, eventually giving out onto where the valley ended abruptly at the top of a cliff overlooking the river. The rushing of the water could be heard far below, and an arched footbridge of gray stone had been erected across the ravine, giving access to the steeply rising ground on the other side and a rougher path that led upward to, presumably, the summit of the fell that gave both river and village their names. Nearer at hand, less hardy souls could continue along the path to the left, which continued along the cliff’s edge, following the twists and turns of the river, or take a narrower track to the right, which rose as it approached the waterfall.

  “Shall we stop here?” Pickett suggested, unwilling to subject Julia to further ramblings until they could learn a bit more about the difficulties this might entail. He recalled the two middle-aged ladies with their stout half-boots, and thought they might prove a useful source for this information.

  “Yes, this is a lovely spot for a picnic,” Julia agreed. “We can see the falls from here without having to shout at each other to be heard over them.”

  Pickett set the basket down so they could spread the blanket beneath a tree nearby. Once this task was accomplished, he placed the basket on the middle of the blanket, whereupon Julia dropped to her knees and began unpacking bread, cheese, the promised cold chicken, and—last, but by no means least—a bottle of wine and two glasses. It fell to Pickett to open this last offering with the corkscrew Mrs. Hawkins had thoughtfully provided, and he stepped away from their picnic cloth to perform this task, not wanting to risk getting it wet. This proved to be a wise decision, for the cork had no desire to relinquish its post, and when it finally yielded to a superior force, the contents of the bottle spewed out, soaking the sleeve of Pickett’s coat to the elbow and sending Julia into whoops of laughter.

  “Oh, so you think it’s funny, do you?” he retorted, his indignation belied by his own rather sheepish grin.

  “Yes,” was her unapologetic reply. “If you could have seen your face—!”

  “You won’t be laughing when word gets out at the inn that your husband is a sot,” he predicted, trying without much success to wring the liquid from his coat sleeve
.

  “At least you may be sure of finding accommodation at the Golden Feather,” Julia observed playfully. “And it might help to preserve your incognito, for no one would suspect you were with Bow Street. At least, I shouldn’t think there were too many Bow Street Runners with a penchant for drunkenness.”

  “No, we leave that sort of thing for the Charleys in the watchmen’s boxes.”

  “I am relieved to hear it. When we return to the inn, we’ll ask Mrs. Hawkins to see what she can do to clean your coat, but in the meantime, you can always take it off and spread it out to dry. There’s no one here to see you in your shirtsleeves.”

  This much was certainly true, for their surroundings were as isolated as any pair of lovers might wish. Pickett shrugged off his coat and laid it out on the grass, then sat down in his shirtsleeves to dine. After they had finished all of the food and made serious inroads into the wine (or as much of it as had escaped the deluge), Julia produced a sketch pad and pencils, while Pickett rolled up his damp coat to cushion his head and, pulling his hat down over his eyes, stretched out on the blanket to enjoy the unaccustomed luxury of an afternoon nap. They spent the better part of an hour in companionable silence, with no sound to break the quiet save for the gurgling of the river below and, nearer at hand, the scratch of charcoal against paper.

  “Julia,” Pickett said thoughtfully, shattering the stillness, “what are we going to tell it?”

  “Tell who?” she asked, although she already knew. When they had married in defiance of every tenet of the world in which they both lived, they had told themselves that, since she could not conceive, no innocent child would suffer for their decision. The discovery of her pregnancy, welcome though it was, had disabused them of this notion. And while Julia might count the world well lost for love on her own account, she wanted her child to be raised in such a way that it could perhaps eventually re-enter the society she had chosen to leave behind. Thus her furtive request of her sister and brother-in-law.