Page 7 of Ghost in the Garden (Murder in Moonlight #3)

C onstance went down to the kitchen about half an hour before a break was due to be decreed. The maids’ voices drifted out of the drawing room, so clearly it was not the time to catch Denise alone.

Ida, however, was alone, just taking a batch of delicious-smelling scones out of the oven.

“Want a cup of tea, dearie?” she asked amiably.

“I’d love one,” Constance admitted, deciding to keep her stories consistent. “I spent all morning chasing my tail, looking for a shawl I’d already put away in its own drawer! I don’t know where my mind goes sometimes.” She put cups onto a tray by way of helping, and sloshed a little cream into each. She had already noticed how the cook liked hers. “Must be my nerves. I’m always like this when I start a new position.”

“Are you, duckie?” Ida poured boiling water from the kettle into the teapot, covered it, and waddled over to the table. Constance brought the tray with the cups. “How many positions you had, then?”

“Just enough to know the signs.”

“How’d you learn to be a lady’s maid, then? Who taught you?”

“I suppose I followed in my mother’s footsteps,” Constance said, although those footsteps had nothing of domestic service about them. “Up to a point. I’ve never been in a house like this before, though. She seems kind, Mrs. Lambert.”

“None kinder,” Ida said with unexpected fervor.

“Have you been with her a long time?”

“Five years. But I knew her since she was a girl.” Ida lifted the lid of the teapot, gave the tea a quick swirl with a spoon, and replaced the lid. “Off and on.”

Constance waited for more, but Ida said nothing, merely hefted the pot in an absent kind of a way and poured out the tea.

Constance tried again. “She’s not a slave driver, either. Very light on the things she wants me to do for her. She says she hasn’t had a lady’s maid before.”

“Make sure you don’t take advantage,” Ida said. For once, her eyes were focused and serious.

“I wouldn’t,” Constance assured her. She sipped her tea. “You’re very defensive of her.”

“I am,” Ida said almost grimly. “Five years ago, I was nothing. I lost my husband and my kids to fever. Had nowhere to live, no job. Had nothing to live for, but she took me in, let me stay for nothing if I just cooked for them. So I did, and then I did it so much that she paid me for it, and brought me here when they moved.”

“From the Acre?” Constance said casually. She thought all the more of Angela Lambert for her kindness, her compassion, but she had to pry and poke until she found out something that made sense of the ghost.

“Yes. I ain’t sorry to see the back of that place, though it’s only a step away. Like another world.”

“I heard of this position through someone who worked for Mr. Gregg,” Constance lied. “Did he ever come here?”

“Now and again,” Ida said with a shrug. “Never came to the old place, and who could blame him? But he were good for Caleb Lambert. Brought connections to the partnership.”

“What did Mr. Lambert bring?” Beside muscled ruffians and a knowledge, no doubt, of slums.

Ida tapped her temple. “Brains. Clever sod, is Caleb Lambert.”

“You like him?” Constance asked, mostly because it hadn’t sounded like a compliment at all.

“Not much. Don’t have to, do I? I cook for him and he pays me well. It’s the missus I like, and always will.”

“Does everyone in the house feel that way?”

A hint of confusion clouded Ida’s eyes, a realization, no doubt, that she’d said more than she should. She took out her flask and poured a splash into her tea.

“Don’t ask,” she said. “But I’d say so. Here come the girls. Duggin won’t be far behind.”

*

Solomon did not linger for long in his old office. Everything appeared to be working just fine without him. He wasn’t sure whether to congratulate himself on that or not.

By the time he left, the mist from the river had risen to connect with outpourings from steam vessels and factory chimneys, clogging the air with thick, stinking fog. It slowed the hackney that carried him into Seven Dials.

In that warren of iniquity, the fog was a mixed blessing. It made his own person harder to see. But then, he could not see attacks coming, either. The footsteps behind him probably only sounded stealthy, and yet someone had followed him from Lambert’s office, possibly even before that…

He was concentrating too hard on the footsteps behind. The attack from the right of a narrow alley took him completely by surprise. A paralyzing blow struck his side, and then he was shoved hard up against a wall, the cold steel of a blade at his throat while he gasped for breath.

“You’re outside your own world,” someone growled into his face, his breath rancid with old beer, fatty meat, and tobacco. “Stay away from the Dials if you want to live.”

And then he was free. Without a mark on him. The luckiest victim in Seven Dials. He hadn’t even been robbed. Bizarre.

Solomon started after his attacker so quickly that he bumped into someone else entirely and was roundly sworn at.

“Sorry,” he muttered, and barged past. But the fog had grown so thick that it was impossible to tell which of the vague, hurrying figures in front of him had been his attacker. He followed one who looked roughly the right shape, and deliberately jostled him to see the reaction.

But it was a much younger man who glared back at him, slapping his hands defensively over his pockets. “Mind your step.”

Solomon gave up. He had been warned off Seven Dials, not the wider area of St. Giles. Interesting …

Thoughtfully and with some difficulty, he found his way to the backstreet where Juliet Silver did her business.

The same youth let him in. This time he waited in the hall, on a slightly dusty chair surrounded by curios of silver, gold, and fine porcelain, in between the junk and the tat. But although he was left alone, he knew he was still being watched. In Constance’s establishment, it was much more blatant. A blank-eyed footman in livery stood to attention within feet, or directly outside whichever salon he had been abandoned in.

Within a couple of minutes, the boy came back and took him not to the parlor he had seen before but an equally cluttered office where the plump, opulent person that, amazingly, was Constance’s mother reached out a hand to him without getting up from the desk.

“What an unexpected pleasure, Mr. Grey. Are you buying or selling, or have you come to ask me for more help?”

“None of these, probably.” He took her hand and bowed slightly, which made her eyes dance.

“Connie know you’re here?” she asked shrewdly.

“Not yet. How much has Boggie been bothering you?”

She still smiled. “Oh, he don’t bother me none, love. I’m much too indolent to get worked about such things.”

“What things?”

Juliet regarded him with sleepy eyes that somehow managed to be perfectly sharp. “I’d think you really were a peeler, except you’re too well dressed.”

“Constance is worried about you.”

Juliet raised her brows with polite disbelief. “You just told me she doesn’t know you’re here.”

“She doesn’t. But she did ask a”—he broke off at the sheer impossibility of describing Janey—“asked a friend who is working for us to look into Boggie and what he wanted with you.”

The disbelief didn’t fade, although her eyes remained fixed on him, perhaps with curiosity. “And what did this friend say?”

“That Boggie is trying to buy out your business and that he had the backing of an unsavory man called Lambert.”

Juliet frowned. “Is Lambert not your unsavory character? Boggie is mine.”

“Then you really don’t know anything about Lambert?”

“I asked around after you left on Tuesday. Made his money from shares in other people’s crimes, and subletting filthy rooms. Rose to being landlord of several such filthy rooms and then tenement buildings. Now he’s shedding everything illegal, while spreading further into anything that’s only just legal. He’s a nasty player. And several people do link him to that collapsed building. They seen him there, and his wife. So it wasn’t just Gregg.”

“I didn’t think it was. Yet Gregg’s carrying the full blame for it.”

“And why do you think that is?” Juliet asked, her lip curling with a hint of contempt for the rich, pampered fellow she thought him.

“Because he’s afraid of Lambert,” Solomon said. “And no one’s going to investigate very far beyond Gregg. A good many of the rich and powerful have fingers in unsavory pies. No one wants to rock a boat full of outwardly respectable slum landlords. Gregg’s a scapegoat, but even he will probably be back.”

Her lips stretched into a faint smile that might just have been reflected in her eyes. “You ain’t just a pretty coat full of bugger all, are you, son? I should’ve known my Constance wouldn’t hook a fool, though she’d have done better to.”

“I’m not a fish, madam,” he said tartly. “I rarely swallow hooks. Can you fend Boggie off? Do you want to?”

She blinked once. “Without being rude, son, what’s it to you?”

“Nothing.” He shrugged. “It’s Constance who cares.”

“You got a very odd idea of our family relationship. She don’t bother me and I don’t bother her.”

“She cares,” he repeated steadily.

Her eyes dropped. “And you don’t understand why, do you? I was the whore who gave her birth and let her follow in my footsteps. Outstripped me for success, and no mistake. And yes, I wasn’t much of a mother. Bet you know that too.”

“Not from her.”

“Obvious, though, isn’t it? And you’re right. She was all I had, and I wanted to keep her out of it. But I was too fond of the bottle to pay attention, and she was always too damned pretty. She was gone before I realized I was killing myself, and by then she wouldn’t listen. She wouldn’t get out. She won’t do it for you, neither, will she?”

“No,” Solomon said.

He hesitated. Constance longed for family, yet largely ignored the mother she had, hoping instead for an unknown father she could admire. Everyone needed a fairytale. And Juliet, like any mother, wanted her child as safe as she could be.

“It’s not exactly what you think. That establishment she runs is as much charity as brothel. She helps the desperate out of the trap of prostitution, while those who prefer the profession are made as safe as they can be. She manages the whole thing. No one touches her.”

He had no proof of that, just the word of her friend, and yet somehow he knew in his bones that it was true.

He half expected a derogatory remark from Juliet about his naivety. It didn’t come. Instead, she spoke of her daughter.

“She’s too young and much too pretty to be a true madam… She was never hard enough, neither. I fear for her.” Juliet’s eyes lifted suddenly to his. “You’d take her out of the whole thing if you could. Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “And yet I’ve grown to admire her for staying.”

A smile lurked on Juliet’s lips. “She would leave it for you. To be with you.”

Shock washed over him like a wave. He didn’t know what it meant. He didn’t even know if she was teasing.

To be with me.

To be with her.

He couldn’t think about that now. In a rush, he said, “I can get you different premises, respectable shop, reasonable rent. And if he follows, I can make life difficult for Boggie’s lawful enterprises—rent increases, constant visits from revenue men and the police looking for stolen goods.”

She laughed, rich, disconcertingly Constance-like mirth. “That, I would love to see. You almost convince me, love, you do. But it’s my goods the police would be all over. ’Cause they know I can’t afford a place like that. You don’t want my kind of connections.”

“You needn’t teach me my business, Mrs. Silver,” he said.

“Jules will do.”

“And I shan’t teach you yours. But you could think about it.”

“Interesting,” she said pensively. “Everyone seems to be trying to move from one side of the law to the other. Boggie, Lambert… I’ll be frank with you, Mr. Grey. I can’t afford to be entirely lawful.”

“You could with a more visible business and wealthier customers. But that is up to you.” He looked at his watch and rose to his feet. “I must go.”

“I asked around about you, too.”

He paused, raising his gaze to her face.

“You’re a bit of a novelty, a bit of a mystery, and much too wealthy to be out alone in these streets. You’ll get lost in the fog. Gerry’ll go with you.”

Solomon had looked after himself in many of the world’s most dangerous ports. But he knew the advantage of accepting favors—or kindnesses. He hadn’t made up his mind which this was.

“Thank you,” he said, inclining his head. He laid a card on her desk, inclined his head once more, and walked away.

*

The fog was swirling thickly outside the kitchen window. Bert was back, so presumably Angela was too, though she had not rung for Constance.

“What does she do out all day?” Constance asked him. “Take tea with friends?”

He regarded her pityingly. “Don’t be daft. She ain’t that kind. She helps his nibs, don’t she? Does the stuff he ain’t got time for.”

Constance didn’t quite like that. Whatever or whoever the ghost turned out to be, she wanted Lambert to pay for the collapsed building. She wasn’t sure she wanted Angela to pay too, just for being a good wife. And one who already felt guilty enough to be haunted by the dead victims.

As Bert went off, she stepped closer to the window and peered out into the darkness. The fog was impenetrable now. At least if Solomon managed to get here, no one would see them meet. Great, cloudy globs of it floated and swirled. Easy to imagine ghostly shapes out of it. As a child, she had done much the same in the darkness, when she had been alone and shivering in her cold attic, longing for her mother’s presence when she could hear her shrieking with laughter in the street, or in the room below.

She shivered, throwing off the memory. The maid Denise stood beside her.

“Ghost weather,” she said derisively. “According to Goldie.”

“Don’t you believe her?” Constance asked.

“I believe she thought she saw something. Trick of the imagination, isn’t it?”

“Then you’ve never seen this ghost?

“Course not.”

“But Bert and Pat and even Mrs. Lambert saw it.”

“Bert and Pat were scaring each other. Gone soft. Robin and I never saw it, and we got up to look as soon as they shouted.”

“You and Robin…?”

Denise looked more defiant than ashamed. “Yes, me and Robin. So don’t you go getting ideas.” There was a brash warning in her voice.

In most houses, they’d be dismissed for such a relationship. This was not most houses. But the girl was pitiably young.

“I have no such ideas,” Constance assured her. “I’m just surprised. Thought you could do better—though I’m sure he’s very handsome.”

Denise’s mouth fell open. Constance meant to leave her with the thought. There was nothing else she could do for her at this stage. Or was there? Not every girl was brought up as wise to the world as Constance had been.

“Here,” she said abruptly. “You know how to prevent unwanted consequences?”

“Robin knows,” Denise said.

“ Never ,” Constance said, “rely on that. Come here.”

She felt a little better after their short chat, even though she’d warned Denise that nothing but abstinence was certain. At least Angela was unlikely to throw her out on the streets in the event of an “accident.”

Ringing drew Constance’s attention to the bell board, and she set off to Angela’s room, keeping a wary eye out for Lambert as she went.

She found Angela already in her evening gown, the back fastenings loose as she gazed out into the mist.

“Well?” she asked without turning.

“I don’t think it’s your staff playing tricks.”

“Never imagined it was.”

Constance began to fasten the hooks of the gown. “I’ll slip out into the garden and keep watch, since it seems to be ghost weather. The dress is lovely, but it needs jewelry.”

“It’s only Caleb and me,” Angela said impatiently.

Constance went to the closed box on her dressing table, opened it, and rummaged. Angela watched her, frowning, and looked surprised when she came up with a single strand of pearls.

“What’s the point?” Angela asked.

Constance fastened them about her throat and regarded her in the glass. “Habit. Knowledge. And it works.”

It did, subtly softening Angela’s severity.

“Dripping in jewels is a mistake for people like us, who’d only be called vulgar. This is tasteful and pretty.”

Angela sniffed derisively, though her gaze lingered on the glass. “You be careful in the garden. Keep out of the way of the boys—unless you catch anyone, then you shout blue murder for them.”

Constance nodded. Deliberately, she didn’t mention Solomon.

As soon as Angela left, Constance hastily tidied up. Then she snatched up her own warm cloak and Angela’s discarded morning dress, which was filthy enough around the hems to justify her lurking around the kitchen for most of the evening. Since Angela had spoken openly, she assumed Lambert was not in his dressing room. Certainly, she saw no sign of him.

In the kitchen, everyone was busy carrying things to the dining room and generally preparing for the evening meal. Duggin was absent. In the laundry room, Constance brushed what could be brushed off the disgusting hem and left it soaking. Then she walked through the kitchen with her cloak on. Ida, red-faced and alone for the moment, was dementedly stirring some potion and did not turn from the stove.

Constance went out into the choking mist, moving instinctively to the right, away from the kitchen doors and windows, but keeping her hand on the dank wall of the building to be sure of her bearings.

There was something very eerie about fog as thick as this. She could well understand people interpreting its drifting, sluggish movements as ghostly, soundless figures. Her skin prickled with irrational unease. Mist also muffled and distorted sound so that she would not necessarily hear the click of the latch in the garden door, or if she did, would she even know what the sound was or what direction it truly came from?

She shivered, grasping the cloak more closely around her, and peered into the murk. It was a night like this she had first met Solomon. He had frightened her more than the dead man who so nearly landed on top of her and killed her. She had not been used to that feeling around men. She still wasn’t. But she only felt it around Solomon, and she had grown so used to it, in all its varying intensities, that she rather liked it. She would miss that if he left. She would miss him.

If he left. What if he didn’t? Would they go on like this forever, as friends, partners, companions, until the physical awareness went away?

No, for Solomon would marry one day, and his wife would not tolerate Constance’s presence in his life, however chaste that presence was.

She drew out the watch she wore on a chain around her neck and looked at the time. Fifteen minutes until she could expect Solomon. A blacker shred of fog drifted, allowing her a glimpse of the apple tree, and she made her way cautiously toward it, straining her ears for the slightest sound.

Abruptly, she froze. Something had clicked, although she couldn’t tell if it came from the house or the garden wall. Someone swore. Someone else sniggered. Pat and Robin. She could locate the sounds now, even make out their shapes moving through the mist toward the garden door. She heard them rattle the latch, to be sure it was still locked, and then they were walking back toward the house, their path erratic, but heading her way.

She was afraid to move or breathe. Though in reality, did it really matter if they found her here? Yes, for they’d probably tell Lambert. Angela had told her not to let herself be seen unless she caught the ghost.

Robin passed within a foot of her. But their attention was all directly ahead, on the misty glow of the kitchen window. When she finally heard the kitchen door close, she moved again toward the back wall, first feeling her way around the apple tree to avoid stepping in the pond, then inching toward the door.

Grasping the key in her pocket, she looked back toward the house. The rooftop was black against the tendrils of mist, the structure mysterious, vanishing into darkness and the occasional faint glow from windows.

She thought about the ghost. Supposing it was a real person, where was it going? Not to the kitchen, for it would be seen. Not to the front of the house, for it had always vanished to the opposite side, to the path. A more thorough check of that side of the building was in order.

She felt rather than heard the movement of the latch, and jerked away from the door. But it didn’t move further. She waited, her breath mingling with the mist. Then, slowly, she brought out the key, fitted it as carefully and as quietly as she could, and turned it. Extracting it, she opened the gate, tensing to face any lurking threat.

Fog and darkness. She waited.

“Constance.”

With relief, she reached for Solomon’s hand and drew him inside, closing and locking the door. She led him back to the apple tree and found him peering down into her face. She stepped closer, standing on tiptoe to reach his ear with her lips.

No one smelled as good as Solomon, all cleanliness and warm spice. “I think we’re fine for half an hour at least. The men have just patrolled the garden. The Lamberts will be dining.”

He’d moved very slightly when she began to speak, as though at the shock of her breath. But he stood perfectly still now, his head lowered to hers.

“And you?” he said in her ear.

A tingle of pleasure passed through her, because it was sweet, and because he cared and was so preciously close. She had to force herself to remember why they were here.

“I think the ghost will come tonight,” she whispered.

“Just because it’s foggy?”

“No. It has always been a Saturday or a Thursday. Earlier in the evening, the ghost comes toward the house, even if not directly. When it’s later at night, it’s going away from the house.”

“On the same evenings?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Not that I’ve found yet, but it makes sense. I don’t think it can be anyone in the house—except Angela, and that makes no sense when she sent for us in the first place. Have you found out any more about Lambert?”

“That he’s dangerous to tangle with. I think it’s him, through Boggie, that’s trying to take over your mother’s business. And I think he’s taking over Gregg’s. He’s almost certainly responsible for the St. Giles disaster.”

“Angela thinks he is too.” She paused, resting her strained feet, then reached up once more. “How do you know that about my mother?”

“Janey sent you a warning message about Boggie and Lambert. I went to see your mother to confirm it.”

Constance closed her eyes. Her fingers on his shoulder curled, gripping the wool of his coat. “She’s in danger, isn’t she? And she won’t—”

“She might,” he murmured. “I’ve given her a way out, if she’ll take it.”

“What…?”

“Later.”

She shifted her head slightly to look into his face, while he gazed beyond her to the garden. Something in her ached. It often did around him, though she didn’t know what it was.

Love, probably, impossible and unrequited.

She rested her forehead against his shoulder, listened to the thud of her own heart, and imagined she could feel his beating in the same rhythm against her. In the circle of his arm, she didn’t feel the cold.

Slowly, she turned her head so that she could see the rest of the fog-clogged garden. She was in no hurry to move. They waited.

And then she saw it.