Friends in High Places Page 2

  ‘Some people are even saying that Alfred and I helped him plan the attempt on Boulogne,’ Lady Blessington said. ‘Total nonsense, of course.’ Her limpid grey eyes gazed into mine. Quite possible, I thought, but didn’t say. I was still waiting to find out why she’d wanted to see me so urgently. I hoped I was not expected to smuggle the prince out of prison. I said, experimentally, that I supposed we’d have to wait and see what happened at his trial.

  ‘Yes. But meanwhile, there are other … complications.’ Hesitation was unusual with her. She laid a hand lightly on my arm. ‘Miss Lane, you and I haven’t known each other for very long and you are young enough to be my daughter, but I feel I can trust you as I would one of my oldest friends. I shan’t insult you by asking for your word that what I say will go no further, but I know I can depend on your kindness and good sense.’

  ‘It will go no further.’ She was clever. What else could I say?

  She nodded. ‘There are some things about the unhappy affair which did not get into the newspapers. They give the impression that all Prince Louis’s men landed at Boulogne and were captured. There was one who remained on the ship. He’s a French gentleman of good family, much attached to the prince. Nobody doubts his courage but nature never intended him for a soldier and he’s not a young man. His position on the prince’s expedition was that of treasurer. The prince knew that he’d need money to pay his men during the march on Paris, but it would be foolish to land it until the barracks and castle at Boulogne were secured. So the money and some important papers remained on board the steamer, the Edinburgh Castle, with the gentleman waiting for a pre-arranged signal. Of course, that signal never came. After the prince’s arrest, the French authorities seized the steamer. The gentleman and his valet, who sounds like a resourceful young man, managed to get away in the confusion while the boat was being searched and took passage on a fishing boat to somewhere on the south coast, then a coach to London. The gentleman knows very few people in London, but he did recall being welcomed at one of my salons a few months ago as a friend of the prince. In his desperate need he presented himself at my door.’ She looked at me, head on one side. ‘So, have you guessed yet?’

  ‘Guessed what?’

  ‘And you an investigator!’

  ‘The gentleman is now lost and you want me to find him?’

  ‘Oh, no. We know exactly where he is.’

  ‘Well then?’

  ‘He needs to get back to France with some papers that may help the prince at his trial. In fact, they may even ensure that he never even comes to trial. But there are people who might be embarrassed by what’s in those papers and he might be in some danger. We’ve discussed it and decided it might be safest to go by boat from Gravesend to The Hague.’

  ‘A very sensible arrangement,’ I said, still waiting.

  ‘He believes, rightly or wrongly, that the French government has somehow found out about the papers and sent agents to kidnap him before he can leave England.’

  ‘Has he thought of notifying the police?’

  She gave me a look that said not to ask stupid questions. ‘Our own government isn’t exactly sympathetic towards Prince Louis. The last thing Pam wants is another Napoleon.’ ‘Pam’ was our mighty foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, also an occasional guest at her salon.

  ‘Is there any evidence about these kidnappers?’

  ‘Possibly yes. Two nights ago I looked out of my window and there was a man behind a statue on the terrace. I sent a couple of my people out to get him, but he escaped. It must have been over the wall or out of the back gate. It’s not locked at night.’

  ‘An ordinary burglar perhaps?’

  ‘Also possible. Another thing – my housekeeper tells me that a young man presented himself last week wanting employment as a footman. She told him there were no vacancies and sent him on his way, but she thought he seemed too curious about the habits of my household. Also, he was a foreigner. He said he’d formerly worked for a Swiss gentleman.’

  ‘That hardly proves he was a French government agent.’

  ‘Indeed not. But it seems strange he should have come out all this way to look for work. It’s possible that I’m being infected too much by our friend’s suspicions, but we can’t take the risk of letting him walk or drive out of here if people are looking for him.’

  That confirmed what I’d already guessed. ‘He’s under your roof, then?’

  For some reason she seemed to find that funny. ‘Very much so. The question is how he’s to be spirited away safely and on to a ship.’

  ‘Lots of ways, I’d have thought. In a laundry basket. Or disguised as one of your maids.’

  ‘There’s his dignity to consider. He’s already ashamed at having deserted the prince, as he sees it. If the story spread that he’d been cowering in a laundry basket or dressed as a woman it would humiliate him entirely.’

  I was rapidly losing sympathy with the man. ‘So he wants a guarantee of safety and dignity. Anything else?’

  ‘A sister.’ She waited until the expression on my face must have told her I’d got the drift. ‘A much younger sister you’d have to be. They’d be looking for a man on his own. Travelling with a woman, he’d be less conspicuous. You could make the travel arrangements, even let it be known that your brother’s an invalid, going abroad for his health. I’m sure he’d have no objection to that. And you’re so observant and resourceful. You’d notice anything amiss long before anybody else.’

  Nobody flattered better than Lady Blessington. That soft voice, the wide grey eyes fixed on my face as if I had the power to grant or blight her dearest wish, would have swayed hearts harder than mine. Then she laughed and I found I was laughing with her.

  ‘I already have a brother.’

  ‘Then take another. I promise you, you’ll find him entirely the gentleman, though perhaps not very conversational. But you can speak French to him. That will help.’

  So it seemed I’d agreed. I wasn’t unhappy about that. In fact, the service she was asking might be a useful distraction from other things. It seemed straightforward too. Amos Legge would drive us to Gravesend and discourage any lurking agents, French or British.

  ‘Do I have to go as far as The Hague with him?’ I said.

  ‘It should be enough to see him on to the ship, but we’d leave that to your discretion. He’s kept enough money to pay expenses.’

  No mention of a fee, though, so I was probably doing this for friendship. ‘When does he want to go?’

  ‘As soon as arrangements can be made. This week, if possible.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. Now, am I to be allowed to meet my brother?’

  She rang for the footman, who appeared so quickly he must have been waiting outside the door.

  ‘Will you please present my compliments to Monsieur Lesparre and bring him here. Say there is a lady I’m anxious for him to meet.’

  While we waited she talked about plays and concerts I’d missed. It seemed a long time before the library door opened and the gentleman walked in. He was in his late forties, slim in build and a little below average height, sharp featured and so clean-shaven that the razor must have scraped over his high cheekbones like a boat keel grounding on sand. His hair was cut short, with more grey than brown in it. He moved quietly and with some dignity, like a man who was used to good carpets under his shoe soles. When Lady Blessington introduced him to me as Monsieur Lesparre, he bowed gravely and looked at me with sad brown eyes. I could see why, in a military expedition, he’d be the one left on the boat. If I’d had a choice of elder brothers I’d have opted for something more lively. He was neatly dressed in black and white with a plain silk waistcoat, clothes a little too tight fitting. I guessed that they might be D’Orsay’s cast-offs. Lady Blessington guided us over to an alcove where three armchairs in green and gold stood between a bust of Homer on a pillar and a small table with a vase of yellow and white chrysanthemums. Monsieur Lesparre waited politely for her nod before sitting.

/>   ‘Miss Lane and I have a plan,’ she told him.

  I decided not to protest that it was her plan, not mine, and said nothing while she described it to him in French, studying his face. I couldn’t see any enthusiasm in it and wondered why she hadn’t discussed it with him earlier. When she’d finished he said he was grateful to both of us for taking such trouble.

  ‘I can see you have reservations,’ she said.

  ‘There are risks.’

  ‘There are always risks. The alternative would be staying here indefinitely and not getting those papers to the prince’s lawyers. The French government will want to put him on trial and get the matter over as soon as possible.’

  She spoke a little sharply. I guessed that she was anxious to get him out of her house and was using me to speed up the process. I couldn’t blame her. If she and D’Orsay had been as deeply in the plot as I suspected, she wouldn’t want to draw attention to them.

  ‘Risks for Miss Lane, I meant,’ Lesparre said. ‘It seems hardly right to involve a lady in my concerns.’

  ‘Miss Lane is used to risks a lot worse than this,’ Lady Blessington said. ‘Besides, our plan avoids them as much as possible. What could be more innocent than a sister helping her invalid brother?’

  ‘When were you hoping to arrange this?’

  ‘As soon as possible. In the next few days if there’s a boat sailing.’

  Again, I had the impression that he was less than enthusiastic, but he nodded and then added, ‘There is the question of Bruno.’

  ‘Mr Lesparre’s valet,’ Lady Blessington explained to me.

  A smile flickered over Mr Lesparre’s grave face and his tone became warmer. ‘Indeed, I can hardly do anything without Bruno. He is a most loyal and capable young man. Without him, I shouldn’t have managed to get away from Boulogne.’

  ‘Is he with you?’ I assumed he’d have been found a place in the servants’ hall, but Mr Lesparre shook his head.

  ‘Bruno thought it best that we should separate in case the servants gossiped. They can be very curious about new arrivals. He has friends among the Italian community in London.’

  Annoyance flickered in Lady Blessington’s usually serene expression at the idea that her servants might gossip. ‘But you know where he is?’

  ‘Not exactly, no. He thought he might move from place to place. But he told me how I might get a message to him.’

  She looked at me, appealing for help. Like her, I wanted to get the business over as soon as possible. ‘If you like, I could take a message,’ I said. She fell on the suggestion as if I’d said something brilliant and within a minute Mr Lesparre was established at her work table with pen, paper and an ink stand in front of him. She drew me to the far end of the library, claiming she wanted to show me some book or other, and pulled a volume out of the shelf at random.

  ‘Well, what do you think of him?’

  I thought that if the life of Prince Louis depended on him it was a long bet, but didn’t want to add to her worries. ‘He seems in no great hurry to go.’

  ‘Yes. I think the valet may be the better man. But you can understand if he’s nervous – all the planning and then everything going so badly wrong. You don’t mind taking the message?’

  ‘In his place, I’d jump at the chance of moving on. After all, Gore House is hardly a hermitage.’

  She laughed. ‘It certainly isn’t. Would you believe, last week we had Pam and the French ambassador in the salon and poor Mr Lesparre just three floors over their heads.’

  ‘Over their heads?’

  ‘When we have company that might be inconvenient we send him up to the loft. We’ve made it as comfortable for him as we can, but it’s not easy with his poor stiff knees. Still, dans la guerre … ’

  We walked back to the table, where Mr Lesparre had folded his note and was heating a stick of red wax over a spirit burner to seal it. He blobbed on the wax and slid a heavy gold signet off the little finger of his left hand. He pressed it down, waited for the wax to harden, glanced at Lady Blessington, then handed it to me. The seal was a phoenix surrounded by a laurel wreath. I turned the note over and saw it was addressed to Bruno Franchetti, care of an address I vaguely remembered as somewhere near Hatton Garden.

  ‘Will there be a reply?’ I said.

  ‘No. I’ve asked him to come back here by Thursday night. Is that soon enough?’

  Lady Blessington glanced at me and I nodded. It would take two days or so to organize the passage. I told them that I’d let them know as soon as I’d booked a sailing for The Hague. Lady Blessington said she’d walk with me through the garden to the stables so we left Mr Lesparre in the library. The poodle followed us through a garden full of late summer flowers, with espaliered apples and pears ripening along the paths of the kitchen plots, fountains splashing and birds singing in aviaries. Lady Blessington stopped outside one large cage that contained nothing but an enormous black raptor on a perch.

  ‘The imperial eagle,’ she said. ‘The one Prince Louis took with him to Boulogne.’

  I decided not to ask how it had got from Boulogne to the garden of Gore House. The bird twisted its head round and glared at us with black pale-rimmed eyes. I looked at the wry neck and the bald blue skin of its head, most un-eagle like.

  ‘I think it’s a vulture,’ I said.

  ‘I thought it might be,’ said Lady Blessington.

  If I were superstitious I might have taken that as a bad omen.

  TWO

  Amos and I discussed it when we rode in the park early on Wednesday morning – I on Rancie, he on an ex-cavalry horse he thought had the makings of a useful hunter. Neither of us could see any great problem. The livery stables where he worked could supply a closed two-horse carriage and Gravesend was an easy day’s drive from London. All that remained to do was find a ship sailing for The Hague in the next few days. That took more time than expected. The most suitable was sailing with the evening tide on Saturday but all the berths were taken. If I cared to come back in the morning the clerk thought there might be a cancellation. No point in going out to Gore House with this uncertain news, so I decided to wait till the next day and went back to Abel Yard. The next thing was to deliver the message to the valet, Bruno Franchetti. By that time, Tabby had decided to reappear. She had her own way of reporting for duty. Among her urchin friends, she wore a tattered shawl belted up for a skirt or even breeches like a boy. When she chose to be my apprentice again, she’d put on the grey dress I’d bought her, with shoes that were scuffed but serviceable and hair pinned up in a way that would be just about respectable in a maid of a none-too-critical household. I accepted her appearance without comment and told her the address of the place near Hatton Garden which was the poste restante of the Italian valet. She thought about it for no more than half a minute then started walking. Her sense of direction was one of the amazing things about Tabby. She couldn’t read or write. If she’d bumped into her own mother in the byways around Shepherd’s Market, they wouldn’t have recognized each other; they’d parted company about the time when children in more conventional families were being taken out of nappies and put into pinafores. Her father wasn’t even a distant memory. She’d fought dogs in the gutter for ham bones and slept in every doorway from Mayfair to Haymarket. But all this, along with a quick ear for names, had given her a map in her mind of London that a cab driver couldn’t equal. She started walking and I fell in alongside her. The way we went, along back alleys and side streets, may have been the most direct but had another aim as well: to avoid patrolling policemen. Tabby and her urchins feared them as mice fear a cat, and had a mouse’s ability to sniff them from a long way off. Our destination turned out to be a narrow side street between Hatton Garden and Leather Lane. By then, we were in Italy. One of the things I love about London is that in a mile or so you can walk through most of the countries in Europe. Refugees from various revolutions and failed coups flock here like dispossessed pigeons and settle on their own ledges. Soho, for instance, i
s as French as Paris, with old aristocrats who escaped the guillotine rubbing shoulders with failed revolutionaries in cafes where good coffee soothes the pain of exile. Hatton Garden is the perch for the refugees from the various Italian statelets, dreaming and scheming under grey London skies for the day when Italy will be united from the Alps to Sicily. They cluster in tall lodging houses with cards in their windows offering, in Italian, rooms or beds for compatriots from different regions – Piedmont, Tuscany, Rome, Naples. On the ground floors small shops as dim as caves spill on to the pavement with sacks folded back to show dozens of varieties of dried beans, brown, white, green or speckled, with thick limbs of sausages dangling from hooks above them. In between the shops and lodging houses, every fourth or fifth house seems to be involved in the making of barrel organs. We passed one grinding away on a street corner surrounded by children who looked too poor to put even a farthing into the cap held out by a monkey in a red fez. The organ grinder was more than half asleep, turning the handle automatically as if it would, in time, generate enough clockwork energy to get him to the West End, where pickings were better. Some of the children ran up to us, begging or trying to sell strings of beads or plaster saints that they produced from ragged pockets. Tabby batted them away with a nonchalance I couldn’t have managed. Women gathered in small groups outside the shops, mostly swathed in black, but some of the men swaggered as if they’d just come down from the mountains, in wide trousers, soft leather boots and cummerbunds that would surely have had swords and pistols in them in their home lands. We passed the steps of a small church with its doors wide open and a smell of incense wafting out, then two houses further on we found the address we wanted. It was a house in mid-terrace, two storeys high with a shop on the ground floor, but this shop was a cut above the others, having windows with glass in and no frieze of sausages. A neatly printed sign in one of the top window frames read, in Italian and English, Mutual Aid Society. More notices, mostly handwritten in Italian, covered so many of the other frames that they almost cancelled out the advantage of having windows at all. Some of them were people looking for rooms to share but most advertised meetings with speakers newly arrived from Italy or, in one case, a charity bazaar for the distressed families of men imprisoned for the cause. It all had a familiar look to me because the various houses where my father had lived usually played host to at least one campaigner for an oppressed cause, usually foreign. Rescuing Italy from under the boot of Austria was one of them. Tabby gazed at them with her impartial hostility for the written word in any form. The door stood hospitably open, so I walked in. Tabby stayed on the pavement. The room had the same chaotic worthy-cause look as the window. It was large, probably taking up most of the ground floor and divided by what had been the shop counter, now occupied by an old hand-printing press, piles of leaflets and empty wine bottles crusted with candle wax. The furniture amounted to no more than a few hard-looking chairs and a large table, equally cluttered. On the far side, a curtain covered a doorway that might lead to a storeroom. A flight of wooden steps led up to a landing with another curtain across it. An elderly man sat at the table writing. He was grey haired, with a gentle, scholarly face, as if he should have been teaching Dante at a Tuscan university, but for all I knew he might have been a retired revolutionary fighter. He wished me good morning in Italian but courteously switched to English when my first few words betrayed that it wasn’t my native language. I explained that I’d been asked to deliver a note and gave it to him. I thought he looked as if the name meant something to him, but he gave a non-committal nod.