Charlotte looked up at her in surprise. ‘How could it? Robert has nothing to do with any of that.’
‘Unless,’ said Henrietta dramatically, ‘he does. That would explain why he has spent so much time with that lot,’ she said excitedly, warming to her own theory. ‘What if Dovedale was sent to investigate Medmenham?’
‘By whom?’ demanded Charlotte. ‘And all the way from India? No.’
Fortunately, she was spared further protests by Miles, who loomed up over Henrietta’s shoulder like a very large jack-inthe-box. He tapped Henrietta’s shoulder.
‘Do you mind if I leave you here?’ he asked, all in one breath. He belatedly added, by way of explanation, ‘Card game.’
Henrietta flapped a hand at him. ‘Enjoy,’ she said.
Miles hovered for a moment. ‘Are you sure?’
Charlotte angled away, trying to afford them a spot of privacy. Leaning over the balcony, she watched the pattern created by the shifting patrons in the pit, marvelling at Henrietta’s ridiculous notion about Robert. She might be prepared to believe many fantastical things, but not that Robert was some sort of – well, some sort of spy. It was too fantastical, even for her. It was true that he was behaving oddly, but there were more than enough explanations for that without bringing in espionage. Henrietta, thought Charlotte complacently, just had espionage on the brain.
It wasn’t surprising. Henrietta’s brother had for years and years confounded the French under the flowery sobriquet of the Purple Gentian. Charlotte had never had terribly much to do with that part of Henrietta’s life. Given the current situation with the king, she rather wished she had. If she had paid more attention to Henrietta’s brother’s tricks and stratagems, perhaps she would have a better idea of how to go about tracking down the identity and origin of the false Dr Simmons.
Below, in the pit, the unresponsive patron had detached himself from the clinging hands of the orange seller and was beginning to push his way out. Charlotte blinked against the glare of the candles. In profile, he really did look very much like Dr Simmons. Charlotte made a face at herself. She clearly had Dr Simmons on her mind; she was starting to see him everywhere, the way Henrietta saw espionage. Without taking her eyes off the pit, Charlotte appropriated Henrietta’s opera glasses. It couldn’t hurt just to check.
‘Just leave me the carriage,’ Henrietta was saying.
Miles beamed at her. ‘Done.’
‘Hen.’ Charlotte tugged on Henrietta’s arm, keeping the opera glasses trained on the dark coat of the moving man.
‘Hmm?’ said Henrietta, blowing a kiss to Miles as he dashed out the back of the box.
‘Hen, look,’ Charlotte said urgently, pointing her fan down into the pit. ‘Down there.’
‘Down where?’ Henrietta fumbled her opera glasses back from Charlotte.
‘The man who just passed the orange seller. Not there. A little more to the right. Do you see? With the bad wig and the lumpy nose?’
‘Ye-es.’
‘That,’ announced Charlotte, ‘is the false Dr Simmons.’
Chapter Twenty-One
‘It’s a very good thing we kept the carriage then, isn’t it?’ said Henrietta, sweeping up out of her chair and pulling Charlotte along behind her.
‘Oh, no,’ began Charlotte. ‘We can’t—’
‘It’s the perfect opportunity,’ said Henrietta firmly, swinging her cloak over her shoulders and hurrying them both along towards the stairs. Charlotte had just time to grab up her own cloak before following. ‘We can follow him straight to the people who hired him. My money is still on the Prince of Wales.’
‘He might just be going home,’ protested Charlotte, catching at her long skirt as they skidded down the stairs.
‘That’s nearly as good,’ said Henrietta. ‘If we can find his lodgings, we might be able to find out who he is. And then you can report all to the queen. Do you see him?’ she demanded as they paused breathless outside the theatre.
Snow fell in large, light flakes, creating a pattern like lace on the dark blue velvet of Charlotte’s opera cloak. It had begun to accumulate on the ground, creating a fine layer of grey mush over the cobblestones, while the horses of waiting carriages lifted their hooves in protest and the waiting chairmen shivered at their posts.
‘There,’ said Charlotte, pointing towards Russell Street, where a line of sedan chairs waited for customers. ‘There he is.’
Beneath an old-fashioned black hat, the man’s crimped wool wig rested against his shoulders like two drifts of snow. His chin was tucked away as far as it would go into the folds of a long muffler, and a caped greatcoat obscured his clothes. She might not be able to make out his features, but there was something decidedly smug about his movements as he sauntered through the night. He avoided the line of chairs for hire, stopping at a point slightly beyond them.
‘Is that a sedan chair he’s getting into?’
Henrietta’s head bumped Charlotte’s as she leant in for a closer look. ‘It doesn’t look like a hired one, does it? But the chairmen aren’t wearing livery, either. How odd.’ By odd, she clearly meant suspicious. ‘It’s like hiring an unmarked carriage.’
‘How will we find yours?’ asked Charlotte.
Cravenly, she almost hoped it would take them too long. Then they could just go back to Loring House and a hot fire. Adventure was all very well and good, but it was frigid cold and the slush was seeping through the fragile fabric of her slippers.
There was no such luck. The carriage was waiting for them right near the entrance to the theatre, one of a line of carriages awaiting the end of the play. Henrietta instructed her coachman to follow the sedan chair at the very end of the row.
‘I don’t expect the doctor will go far,’ she said to Charlotte, sinking back against the cushioned seat while Charlotte burrowed under a pile of lap rugs. ‘If he meant to go any distance, wouldn’t he have called for a carriage rather than a sedan chair?’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Charlotte. There were still streets in London too narrow for a carriage to pass, places where only a sedan chair would do. They were not neighbourhoods she usually had occasion to visit.
It was too late to back out now, though. Ahead of them, the chairmen had hoisted their burden, choosing their footing carefully on the snow-slick cobbles. The initial flurry had melted into the ground, but a fine dusting of snow was beginning to stick, not enough to create drifts, but just enough to make walking treacherous. It was, as the saying had it, a night fit for neither man nor beast.
Charlotte felt the familiar quiver as the coachman coaxed the horses into movement, sending the carriage swaying on its narrow wheels. The false doctor had hired a linkboy to light his way. As they edged along a discreet distance behind, the small burst of light winked in and out of the snow like a shooting star reflected through an astronomer’s lens.
Through the shifting snow, Charlotte spotted the old Savoy Palace on the Strand and briefly recognised her surroundings, but then the sedan chair shifted sharply sideways, down a side street, and Charlotte was lost again. All she knew was that they weren’t in Mayfair anymore.
The carriage lumbered deeper and deeper into a tangled warren of streets that seemed to twist and turn in on themselves like the strands of a spider’s web. Charlotte had never actually been to a stew or a rookery, but this was how she imagined one must look, with the upper stories of buildings tilting haphazardly over their bottoms. Any closer, and the carriage wouldn’t be able to pass. As it was, it was a tight fit.
Charlotte was only glad that the weather had prompted the residents to take refuge indoors, behind bolted shutters. She doubted this was a neighbourhood in which carriages passed often.
‘I suppose conspiracies can’t very well meet in Mayfair,’ she said, catching at the side of the seat as the carriage lurched across a rut.
‘I don’t see why not. It would be so much more convenient.’
‘For us.’ Charlotte doubted that this was the conspirators’ primary concern. ‘
What if he means to go somewhere the carriage can’t follow?’
Henrietta glanced ruefully at her evening slippers. They were stylish, but not terribly sturdy. ‘Then we follow on foot.’
Charlotte looked dubiously out the window. ‘What if it’s not safe?’
With an air of unnerving competence, Henrietta whipped something out from beneath the seat. ‘That’s why I keep this in the carriage.’
It was long and metallic and had pretty mother-of-pearl inlay that sparkled in the light of the carriage lamp. Not all the mother-of-pearl in the world, though, could disguise the deadly purpose of the rounded barrel and elegantly curled trigger.
Charlotte instinctively ducked. ‘Do you know how to use it?’
‘Oh, Richard and Miles taught me ages ago.’ Henrietta hefted the firearm with a nonchalance that made Charlotte scoot back against the seat. If she could, she would have crawled into the seat, just for the extra padding. ‘Of course, it has been a while, but it should act just as well as a deterrent without our actually having to fire them.’
‘Them?’ Charlotte didn’t like the sound of that.
‘For you,’ said Henrietta benevolently, pressing the twin of her pistol into Charlotte’s hand. ‘You point. They run. Don’t worry! Yours isn’t loaded.’
The butt of the gun felt very cold, even through Charlotte’s glove, and surprisingly heavy. The weight of it bent her wrist back at an uncomfortable angle.
‘Should that make me worry more, or worry less?’ she asked, frowning at her firearm. If one was going to deal in the hideous things, one might at least have the use of it.
‘I really did just bring them along as a precaution,’ Henrietta hastened to reassure her. ‘I don’t think we’ll have to use them.’
Charlotte regarded the slim piece of steel dubiously. ‘I hope you’re right.’
Between the decaying buildings, the strong smell of sewage, and the firearm in her hand, this was all beginning to take on just a little too much of the taint of reality. It was all very well to theorise about a bit of ladylike eavesdropping from the comfort of Henrietta’s morning room, but it was another thing entirely to find oneself, at dead of night, in a decidedly dodgy bit of London with a pistol dangling from one hand and a smell one didn’t like to think too much about battering insistently on the windowpanes. In that, at least, the cold was probably a blessing. Charlotte didn’t want to imagine what it would have been like in summer, with people reeling out of tavern doors and the stench of unwashed flesh magnified by the humid air.
This, she realised, was probably what Penelope had meant when she argued that Charlotte was mad to want to go back to the Middle Ages, pointing out that the stench of a midden would undoubtedly outweigh the thrill of a joust. For the first time, Charlotte had an inkling of what Pen had meant. Some things worked far better in imagination than reality. In imagination, she was intrepid and resourceful; in reality, she wished she were home, wrapped in a quilt.
Down a dark and crooked street, the unmarked sedan chair drew to a halt in front of a building where broken shutters had been augmented by the addition of boards of wood hammered over the windows. A wooden sign creaked from a pole above the door, indicating its occupation as an alehouse. On the crudely carved sign, a potbellied ape sank his teeth with obvious enjoyment into an apple whose red paint had long since flaked off, except for a few sanguinary flecks of red adhering to the monkey’s teeth. The red flecks gave the ape a decidedly carnivorous air.
Next door, an old church sank into its foundations, as if wearied by the evidence of original sin. Even the stones in the graveyard could not be bothered to stand up straight; they tilted dispiritedly to one side, worn by time and pocked with snow.
The man who emerged from the sedan chair had undergone a transformation of his own. Gone were the cracked buckles on his shoes, the tricorne, the wig. Instead, the king’s physician was enveloped in a covering of dark fabric from his ankles all the way up to his hooded head. In one hand, he held an old-fashioned lantern, shuttered on three sides.
In the dark interior of the carriage, Henrietta and Charlotte exchanged a long look. ‘This just gets odder and odder,’ whispered Henrietta.
‘Is that a cassock?’ whispered back Charlotte. ‘Why would he be wearing a cassock?’
‘I don’t know! Do you think we followed the wrong sedan chair?’
Instead of entering the Ape and the Apple, the hooded figure crunched his way through the dead weeds and bits of cracked crockery that littered the old graveyard. The light of his lantern disappeared with him into the side of the church. There had to be a door there, Charlotte rationalised. The crackle of crockery underfoot had been too crisp for their hooded friend to be anything but corporeal.
‘What could he possibly want in there?’ demanded Henrietta.
‘It is a little late for Evensong.’
Henrietta’s lip curled. ‘I don’t think that church has seen Evensong for quite some time. Just look at it.’
Whatever stained-glass windows the church had possessed had been long since broken, the empty embrasures covered with the same boards used to bolster the drunken shutters of the alehouse on the other side of the graveyard. No light showed through the gaps in the boards. The church lay dark, still, and abandoned, isolated from the surrounding buildings by the scraggly churchyard.
‘Do we go in?’ whispered Charlotte, contemplating the long and twisty street with disfavour. There didn’t seem to be much distinction between street and gutter in this part of the town. Even blurred by snow, the alley was pitted with ruts and strewn with debris. Dark gaps showed between the houses and shops, like slashes in the fabric of the street. They made ideal crevices for footpads to lurk, ready to pounce on unwary ladies from Mayfair.
Looking no more thrilled by the prospect than Charlotte, Henrietta set her jaw bravely. ‘If we want to know what he’s doing there.’
Charlotte took that as a yes. ‘If I go through the front, will you go around the back?’
‘That seems to make the most sense,’ Henrietta agreed. ‘You have your pistol?’
Charlotte lifted it in silent assent, pleased to notice that it didn’t wobble any more than one might have expected from its weight. Now that the moment had come, she wasn’t displeased to have it. Leaving the carriage around the corner, the two women slid out of the carriage, moving awkwardly on limbs stiff from sitting in the cold. Henrietta slipped on a slushy patch of snow, and Charlotte caught her arm before she could go skidding down into the gutter.
‘Just practising,’ whispered Henrietta.
Charlotte nodded beneath her hood. ‘We’ll do better from now on.’
The sign of the Ape and the Apple swayed above her head, the chains creaking like a raven cawing in the night. She could hear movement within the tavern as they passed, laughter muted by the wooden boards and a sour reek she assumed must be ale, but no one flung open the sagging door and demanded to know their business. Perhaps hooded women skulking down the street wasn’t quite so unusual as one would expect. Charlotte concentrated on keeping her footing and avoiding the most suspicious-looking protrusions beneath the snow.
The churchyard looked even more derelict up close, the scraggly remains of the summer’s weeds crawling over the broken stones. The air whistled sharply through the cracks between the buildings, stirring the sodden weeds and sending broken shutters thumping back and forth. It played auditory tricks, carrying the sounds of voices and laughter from the tavern and swirling them through the churchyard like the faint cackling of malicious spirits.
Imagination, Charlotte assured herself. It was all imagination and the wind. Who would possibly be in a ruin of a church by night? Except for the king’s false physician, that was. Charlotte turned her mind from ghostly revels and tried to focus on him instead.
Freeing one arm from her cloak, Charlotte reached out to squeeze Henrietta’s hand. ‘Are we ready?’
‘I’ll see you inside.’ With an answering squeeze, Henrietta di
sappeared around the side of the church while Charlotte stepped gingerly onto the broken flagstones leading up to the stone stairs.
The faithful must have walked that same path to Sunday prayer once upon a time, but now the paving stones were little more than pebbles, cracked and broken, and the stone stairs sagged in the middle from the press of generations of feet. Charlotte put her hand carefully to the warped wood of the door and was surprised when it gave with no sound at all. Charlotte had heard tales of miracles of oil, but none involved hinges.
It was darker inside than out. In comparison to the snow-grey sky, the interior of the church pressed down on her like a heavy fall of black cloth, textured with the lingering scents of old incense and damp stone, as though the very air had grown mould. Charlotte groped her way past the door, feeling only rough wall, bare of paintings or statues. In the blackness, space had no meaning; it was a struggle simply to determine the shape of the space around her. The church had been stripped long ago, the only sign of any habitation the looming bulk of the heavy pillars that marched double file down the centre of the nave. Any pews had long since been stolen and broken up for firewood. If there had ever been a confessional, it had gone the same way. Charlotte didn’t like to think where the baptismal font must have got to.
It was dark, but not silent. All around her, Charlotte could hear the distant rumble of voices, low voices, masculine voices, talking all at once, the peculiar acoustics of the vaulted ceiling projecting and echoing the sounds like a song sung in round.
Charlotte started nervously as the first clamorous stroke of a bell reverberated stridently through the nave. The sound was almost palpable in the darkness; it seemed to be swinging straight towards her. Again it tolled and again, the noise filling the blackness, making Charlotte’s head ring even as her nose twitched with the scent of incense, which appeared, inexplicably, to have grown stronger. At nine strokes, Charlotte expected the bell to stop ringing, but it kept on, battering against the walls of the church, marking something more than the hour. It rang out a thirteenth peal before finally echoing into unnerving silence. A superstitious shiver ran down Charlotte’s spine.