Larcenous Lady Read online

  “Ain’t. Elvira said Rome, clear as day.”

  “Deirdre said Venice. They’re all going together.”

  “Going to Rome,” Pronto assured him.

  “Then why did Deirdre say Venice?”

  Pronto shook his head sadly. “For the same reason she led you down the garden path about coming back down tonight, Dick. To pay you back for everything. The whole lot of ‘em are likely chuckling up their sleeves this minute.”

  Belami glared. There was just enough plausibility in this explanation to turn him wary. Deirdre had been vexed with his London doings. Was she playing off a stunt on him? It was clear now why Miss Sutton had snubbed him as well. Deirdre had put her up to it to teach him a lesson.

  “It’s just as well,” he said, feigning a show of indifference. “Actually I wouldn’t mind having a few days to look into this Jalbert-Styger thing.”

  “Include me out. I told Elvira I’m on holiday from crime.”

  “She knew your reputation, did she?” Dick asked. He remembered Elvira’s one smile at him—it had occurred when he’d mentioned Styger, and if it was done to distract him, it had succeeded. Now why would she want to distract his attention from Styger?

  “No getting away from it. We’re famous. But there ain’t nothing to look into,” Pronto said. “Of course it gives you an excuse to hang around the Licorne. You might spot Deirdre and place yourself in position for another kick.”

  “Deirdre who?” was Belami’s manner of indicating that the hostilities had been resumed.

  Chapter Four

  After leaving Belami at the assembly, Deirdre went very quietly into the room she shared with her aunt. Her spirits sank when she saw the light still burning, and the duchess propped up on her pillows reading one of her gothic mysteries. Her scanty knob of gray hair was bound up in a cap, giving her grace more than ever the air of a gargoyle.

  “You’re back early. You look upset. Did some vile Frenchie get his hands on you?” the duchess demanded eagerly.

  “No, Auntie, it was fine,” Deirdre said. She conned the possibility of hiding the truth, but knew it was impossible. “Belami was there, which is why we left early,” she admitted.

  “The scoundrel! I feared he would follow us. I hope you didn’t stand up with him?”

  “No,” Deirdre answered—sticking to the letter, if not the spirit, of truth.

  “Good! I should hate to think any kin of mine so soft, after the way he carried on in London since jilting you.”

  “He didn’t jilt me,” Deirdre countered. Oh, dear, but he surely would if she didn’t return belowstairs tonight.

  “He refused to marry you. I call that a jilting. Perhaps nowadays you gels call it true love.”

  Deirdre had other fish to fry and let this subject die. “I thought you’d be sleeping by now. Have you not taken your laudanum, Auntie?”

  “I got reading Mrs. Radcliffe’s Udolpho and couldn’t put it down. Such a marvelous book! I shan’t need a sleeping draught. Just hurry up your undressing and let us get the lamp extinguished.”

  Deirdre had no option but to do as she was told. Her aunt should soon be snoring. She’d have to get dressed again later. She didn’t think Dick would leave till she arrived.

  A sly grin settled on Charney’s haggard face. Into the darkness she said, “I have the strange feeling I shan’t sleep much tonight. I want to lie awake and think about business matters. It has just occurred to me I could let Fernvale while we’re away. Yes, I have a deal to think about. Good night, Deirdre.”

  “Good night, Auntie,” Deirdre said in a small, sad voice.

  The duchess knew. In some magical manner she had figured out that Dick was waiting belowstairs and was doing this to thwart their plans. Deirdre’s main goal now was to let him know what had happened.

  After an hour’s plotting, her eyes closed and soon her slow, even breaths told Charney the girl was asleep. Now the duchess could get down to scheming in earnest. Preventing this particular marriage had become a sort of avocation to the bored old lady. She had no real hatred of Belami, except that he had outwitted her a couple of times in the past.

  Still, Deirdre must be rescued from the most handsome, eligible jackanapes in England. Of course, Deirdre would have told him they were remaining in Paris a week. He would not be desperately eager to settle things. The duchess’s course then was to leave Paris immediately. By eight-thirty in the morning, they would all be on their way.

  The greatest care and some expenditure of money was necessary to execute this scheme. Before going down to breakfast, the duchess called a hotel maid and told her to pack their trunks and the Suttons’. This done, it remained only to convince Meggie that Paris was not worth seeing. She led her victim to a separate small table for breakfast.

  “We’ll let the gels discuss last night’s party in peace,” she declared. “They will speak more freely without us, Meggie.”

  While Elvira and Lucy teased Deirdre about her beau, the duchess brought her persuasions to bear on Mrs. Sutton. She assumed a pitiful countenance and said, “Belami is the most ramshackle rake in Europe. I tell you quite frankly, I don’t put an elopement past him. Not that I blame you for landing him down on our heads, though it is a great pity you ever accepted a favor from him in the first place. And to allow your daughters to be familiar with him! He will have an eye for Elvira, certainly. And she a clergyman’s daughter! What easy work he would have with her or Lucy.”

  Meggie showed a very proper concern but was somewhat obstinate on leaving Paris immediately. “We could remove to another hotel,” she suggested.

  “That wouldn’t stop Belami for two minutes. It is the very sort of prank to interest him. No, we must leave France.”

  At the end of breakfast, Mrs. Sutton was still showing a remarkable stubbornness, but to soothe her friend she reached for the bill. “It’s my turn, I believe,” she said, and handed the waiter a gold coin.

  The waiter looked at it suspiciously. “It’s English money—a gold sovereign,” Mrs. Sutton explained. “They’ve been accepting them in payment here at the hotel.”

  “Stupid Frenchies,” the duchess said. “It is argent anglais, my good lad. Now be off with you.”

  The waiter left, but the duchess was not willing to let him off with the rudeness of speaking French. She collared the one servant in the establishment who spoke English and gave him a piece of her mind.

  “A thousand apologies, your grace,” he said with pleasing humility. “There have been some reports of counterfeit coins from England circulating in Paris. Yours was not a counterfeit. It was a perfectly good sovereign. I regret the inconvenience.”

  “A demmed impertinence, I call it,” the duchess said. Her wrath was as much for Meggie as the waiter.

  “Do you really feel Deirdre is in danger?” Meggie asked.

  “She is in peril for her life. But of course you want to see that rubbishing old heap, Notre Dame. Who can blame you?”

  Mrs. Sutton looked abashed at this plain speaking. “You make me ashamed for myself, your grace. We shall leave at once. I’ll tell the girls.”

  A sly smile alit on Charney’s face. “Don’t tell them,” she said. “Let us surprise them, Meggie. I don’t want to give Deirdre an opportunity to write to Belami. She is not a totally unwilling victim, I fear.”

  They left, and within fifteen minutes the hapless young ladies were being herded into the post chaise. Only Deirdre expressed any surprise or dismay to see the luggage on top.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “We are leaving Paris,” the duchess announced, with a triumphant grimace. “Come along, Deirdre. You don’t want the Frenchies to mistake you for a fish with your mouth gaping open. Hop in.”

  Elvira put her hand on Deirdre’s elbow and whispered in her ear, “I left Belami a note at the desk. He’ll follow you.”

  Deirdre gave no verbal reply, but smiled gratefully at her friend. Without further ado, she clambered into the carriage, where
many secret smiles were exchanged, causing her grace any amount of worry. But she was in good humor. The war was never quite over with Belami. She had won a battle at least.

  At his hotel, Belami had decided that as he’d made the first gesture, the next must come from Deirdre. If it had not been a stunt but only some interfering by Charney, Deirdre would write to him. It couldn’t be impossible for her to send off a note. She wasn’t kept bound and gagged in her room after all.

  Pronto was not such an eager sightseer that he objected to spending a morning at the hotel with his boots on the fender of a cozy fire, with a pitcher of Irish coffee beside him.

  “What we’ll do is run along to Notre Dame this afternoon,” he suggested to Dick. “Bound to be the first place the ladies go. And if they ain’t there, you can put Réal on their scent.”

  “I’ve seen Notre Dame. I’m going to spend some time at the Louvre.”

  “The picture place?” Pronto asked suspiciously. “I’ll give that a pass. Can see all the pictures of popes and saints I want to in England. We don’t want to miss the place where they used the guillotine. Didn’t get to see John the Baptist’s head. Don’t want to miss out on the guillotine as well.”

  “That’d be la Place de la Concorde, on the Right Bank.”

  “Not much chance of a head lying around, I daresay.”

  Both gentlemen kept a close eye on the desk, hoping to be paged for a message, but by noon none had come, and they went out to lunch. Belami went to the Louvre as he’d planned. Sure that Pronto would bring him home a note, Belami was already formulating plans to detach Deirdre from her chaperone that evening or, in the worst case, add the duchess to the party.

  He returned to the hotel at five, his feet tired from walking and his mind whirling with images from the Louvre. Pronto wasn’t back yet, so Belami picked up a newspaper, ordered a bottle of wine, and went to his room. He riffled desultorily through the pages, glancing at the political news. On page three, the words fausse monnaie anglaise seemed to jump out at him. Counterfeit English money! He read on eagerly. Three shops in the Montmartre district had received false coin, in each case a guinea. There were no other reported cases of counterfeit coins in Paris, but merchants were warned to be on the lookout.

  A tingling on his neck alerted him that a case was beckoning. The Jalbert gang in Paris? He thought of the newspaper seen last night—but the Licorne was nowhere near Montmartre. Three coins—perhaps a victim like himself who picked the counterfeits up at Dover? If the whole gang was involved in it, there should be more than three guineas around. He took his own counterfeit out and fingered it.

  A swell of impatience surged up in Belami. He should have done some investigating before he left England. How many men were in the Jalbert gang, for instance? Were they young, old, any physical characteristics that would easily distinguish them? Was one of them a grizzle-haired man with a ruddy complexion, posing as a sea captain? But really he needed his time free to rewin Deirdre. This was not the moment to intrude into a case uninvited.

  As he flung the paper aside and poured a glass of wine, he heard Pronto’s telltale scratching at the door. “Entrez,” he hollered.

  Pronto poked his head in and asked, “Are you alone?”

  “Of course I am. What happened to you? Did you fall off the steeple at Notre Dame?”

  Pronto’s face was smeared with grime, and as his corpulent frame came into the room, his whole toilette was seen to be similarly soiled. An unpleasant aroma accompanied him.

  “Heh, heh. No, I didn’t go to Notre Dame after all.”

  “You didn’t go to Notre Dame! But I counted on you, Pronto. You were supposed to meet Deir—the ladies.”

  “Dick, you won’t believe it,” Pronto said, mincing forward and picking up the bottle of wine to wet his whistle.

  “Did you see them? Where? What did she say?”

  “I didn’t see them,” Pronto said, batting the question aside. “I went to that Concorde place—nothing worth looking at. Guillotine’s gone; they’ve cleaned up all the gore. I met this fellow there with a boat, Dick. You’ll never guess what.”

  “You fell into the Seine!”

  “Devil a bit of it. I fell into the sewer. This fellow, Henri—he took me on a boat ride through the sewers. There was never anything like it. The whole city’s built on a honeycomb of sewers. And that ain’t the best of it! There’s millions of dead bodies down there. The place is built up with masonry roofs and galleries and I don’t know what all. They’ve taken the bones from cemeteries and made patterns with them along the sides of the galleries. I tried to pry a couple loose, but they’re stuck in there like a nut in its shell.”

  “Good lord.” Belami laughed. “You come to Paris, the most highly cultured city in Europe, and spend your day riding around sewers!”

  “We don’t have ‘em in England. Broaden ourselves, you said. See things we don’t have at home. By Jupiter, there ain’t anything like this in the whole world.”

  “You’ll love Rome. So you didn’t see the ladies then?”

  “They wasn’t there. The duchess would love it though.”

  “Yes,” Belami agreed, and glanced at his watch. Five-thirty, and still no word from Deirdre. It was beginning to look very much as though she had made a cake of him. A jolt of anger stabbed him. “Well, Pronto, what shall we do this evening? I wonder if there are any good wakes we could take you to. It’ll be hard to top the catacombs.”

  “Deirdre didn’t send you a note?”

  “I haven’t heard from her,” he answered offhandedly. “What do you say we go to the opera tonight? If you start soaking now you might be clean in time.”

  “Charney won’t spring for tickets to the opera.”

  “I’m not going to see Charney. Madame duChêne is singing this evening. I’m a great admirer of hers.”

  “Opera singing, eh?” Pronto asked. “Believe I’ll pass. I’ll drop around at the Licorne and see what Elvira has in mind. Let you know what Deirdre’s up to,” he added.

  “All right,” Belami answered, well pleased with the plan.

  He knew by the glazed eye of his friend that Pronto was woolgathering. He thought it was the incomparable Elvira that caused that moonstruck look, till Pronto spoke to disillusion him. “Millions of dead bodies, all done up in herringbone and x’s and parallel lines. It’d be a shame for you to come all the way to Paris and not see the sewers. But be careful of the rats. Place is swarming with ‘em. Shifty-eyed rascals. Reminded me of Charney.”

  The gentlemen went their separate ways. Madame duChêne proved to be rather more buxom and more piercing of voice than Belami liked. He left at the first intermission and went back to his hotel. Pronto was there, pacing the lobby. He ran forward. “Disaster, Dick!” he exclaimed. “They’ve gone. Elvira, Deirdre, Charney—the lot of them. They sneaked out at the crack of dawn this morning. Left no forwarding address, no notes for us, nothing.”

  Belami was stunned. “But they just got here! They’ve only changed hotels.”

  “Leave the Licorne when Charney had found just what she wanted? There’s nothing cheaper in the decent part of town. No, she only left that dump to go to Italy—or back to England.”

  “You’re sure there was no note left for me?”

  “I asked—three times. The clerk was beginning to think I was up to something. There was only one message left all morning, and it was for a Mr. Plunkett. They’ve shabbed off, Dick. I didn’t think Elvira would serve me such a turn.”

  “Plunkett?” Belami asked. A quick frown pleated his brow. “Plunkett might be an alias for Captain Styger.”

  “If it is, there ain’t much news for him. I read the note. The clerk let me have a peek at it for a half crown. It said ‘Change of plans. Leaving immediately. Claude.’ I thought for a minute it was from Elvira, till I saw the signature. Her name ain’t Claude. Mine ain’t Plunkett, so there you are.”

  “So Plunkett was planning to meet someone at the Licorne. I wonder if he�
��s staying at Montmartre.”

  “Don’t see that it matters to us.”

  Pronto listened with very little interest to Belami’s suspicions regarding Styger-Plunkett. “All based on a bit of spilt brandy. Pretty slim stuff.”

  “Agreed, but I shall have Réal go to the Licorne and see if the note’s been picked up, and, if possible, discover who wrote it. It’s obviously someone staying at the Licorne.”

  Pronto shook his head. “Someone who was staying at the Licorne. ‘Change of plans. Leaving immediately.’ Claude left the note early this morning. He’s your man. No mystery there.”

  “His last name’s a mystery.”

  “I’ll leave it to you, my friend. I’m more interested in finding Elvira. I’ll stick around a day till Réal finds out where they went. If they’ve left Paris, I’m off to Rome.”

  “Venice,” Belami countered.

  “Italy.”

  Réal was sent for and came to meet his master in the lobby. “You require the carriage?” he asked in a thin voice. He had met a very charming French seamstress and was on his way to pick her up.

  “No, Réal, but I’d like you to run around to the Licorne and make a few inquiries for me.” Belami outlined his questions.

  “Sacrebleu!” Réal scowled, but duty had its way. “I go at once, melord.”

  He scampered around the corner and made the inquiries. Belami was still in the lobby when he returned. “The maid who packs the trunks, she hears talking of Venice, not another hotel in Paris. The note for Monsieur Plunkett, it is picked up by a red-faced man tonight. There was no Claude staying at the hotel. No gentleman of the initial C, first name or last.”

  “The clerk didn’t get a look at Claude?”

  “He don’t see who leaves the note,” Réal said curtly.

  Belami recognized by the symptoms that Réal had a tryst and said, “Thanks, Réal. You’re free to join your lady now. I hope I haven’t interfered too much with your plans.”

  “Lady?” Réal asked, eyes wide in contradiction.

  “Female—the redhead you were talking to at the Louvre this afternoon. Très jolie. Enjoy yourself—use the carriage if you want to impress her.”