Death at Dawn: A Liberty Lane Thriller

Next morning we breakfasted together on good bread and bad coffee, then she took the coach for Chatham while I passed some time looking round the town, admiring the fashions and waiting for the coach that would take me on the last stage of my journey to Dover.

I reached the port in the evening. I knew it quite well, from the occasions when I’d crossed to the Continent with my father and Tom, but I’d never been there on my own before. I stood at the inn where the coach had put me down feeling for the first time scared at what I’d done. Then, determined that my father should not come back to find a feeble young woman, I adjusted my bonnet, slung my mantle over my arm and picked up my bag. I was wearing my second-best dress in plain lavender colour, with tight-fitting sleeves and a little lace at the neck. My bonnet had suffered from travelling outside and my hair felt plastered with dust, but I hoped I looked respectable, though travel-worn. The inns and hotels along the seafront and near the harbour were too expensive and conspicuous. If my aunt sent somebody after me, those were the first places he’d try. I walked along a dimly remembered side street, at right angles to the sea, and hit on an old inn called the Heart of Oak that looked as if it catered for the better class of trades-person rather than the gentry. The dark panelled hall smelled of beer and saddle leather. A brass bell stood on a counter. I rang and after some time a plump bald-headed man arrived, wearing a brown apron stained with metal polish.

‘I should like to engage a room,’ I told him, as confidently as I could. ‘Not one of your most expensive ones.’

‘Just for yourself, ma’am?’

His voice was polite enough, but his boot-button eyes were weighing me up.

‘Just for myself.’ Then, losing my nerve a little, I added, ‘I’m here to meet my father. He’s coming across from Calais.’

Which was the perfect truth, even though the look in those eyes made it feel like a lie.

‘How many nights, ma’am?’

‘He may be arriving as early as tomorrow …’

‘Tomorrow’s Sunday.’

‘… or I might have to wait a day or two. I am not entirely sure of his plans.’

That was true as well, although one thing I was entirely sure of was that my father’s plans did not include having his daughter there to meet him at Dover. His latest letter – in my bag and marking my place in the volume of Shelley, which was the only book I’d brought with me – made it quite clear that I was to wait at Chalke Bissett until called for. The innkeeper grudgingly admitted there was a room on the second floor he could let me have.

‘I’ll take supper in my room,’ I told him. ‘Mutton chop, some bread and cheese, and a jug of barley water.’

He nodded gloomily and called the bootboy to carry my bag upstairs to a small but reasonably clean room, furnished with bed, chair and wash-stand. I tipped the boy sixpence and, as the door closed behind him, spread out my arms and opened my mouth in a silent but most unladylike yell of triumph. When supper arrived I ate it to the last crumb then slept in the deep featherbed as comfortably as any dormouse.

I idled Sunday away pleasurably enough, tipping the little maid a shilling to bring cans of warm water upstairs so that I could wash my hair. When it was dry I strolled along the front in the sunshine, watching families driving in their carriages or walking back from church, and sailors arm in arm with women friends, bonnet and bodice ribbons fluttering in the breeze from the sea. The white cliffs gleamed and the old grey castle on top of them seemed from a distance to have broken out in patches of pink-, green-and lilac-coloured mushrooms, from the parasols of the ladies sight-seeing. In such a busy place, nobody was in the least disturbed by a young woman walking unescorted. I revelled in being alone and the mistress of my own time for once.

But on Monday morning I woke at first light with a little demon of anxiety in my mind. Now that I might be meeting my father within hours, it occurred to me that he would perhaps be annoyed because I had disobeyed instructions. I took his letter out of my bag and read it by the window as the horses stamped and the ostlers swore down in the yard. It had been written from a hotel in Paris, posted express, and arrived at Chalke Bissett just the evening before I left, too late to change my plan of escape.

My dearest Daughter,

I am glad to report that I have said farewell to my two noble but tedious charges and am now at my liberty and soon to be on the way home to my Liberty. I have faithfully conducted His Lordship and cousin around Paris, Bordeaux, Madrid, Venice, Rome, Naples. All wasted, of course, like feeding peaches to donkeys. They pined for their playing fields, their hunters, their rowing boats at home. The stones Virgil and Cicero trod were no more than ill-kept pavement in their eyes, the music of Vivaldi in his own city inferior to a bawled catch in a London tavern.

But enough. I have justly earned my fee and we may now set about spending it as we planned. If I had travelled home with my charges I should have rescued you from Aunt Basilisk sooner, but I’m afraid my princess must fret in her Wiltshire captivity a week longer. I had business here in Paris, also friends to meet. To be candid, I valued the chance of some intelligent conversation with like-minded fellows after these months of asses braying. Already I have heard one most capital story which I promise will set you roaring with laughter and even perhaps a little indignation. You know ‘the dregs of their dull race …’ But more of that when we meet. Also, I have just met an unfortunate woman who may need our help and charity when we return to London. I know I may depend on your kind heart.

I plan to be at Chalke Bissett about a week from now. Since even five minutes of my company is precisely three hundred seconds too many for dear Beatrice/Basilisk I’m sure she will not detain us. So have your bags packed and we shall whisk away. Until then, believe me your loving father.

Then, after his signature, a scrawled postscript.

If you’d care to write to me before then, address your letter to poste restante at Dover. I shall infallibly check there on my arrival, in the hope of finding pleasant reading for the last stage of my journey.

As I re-read it, I was seized with a panic that he might at that very moment be stepping off a boat and posting to Chalke Bissett, not knowing I was waiting for him less than a mile away. I ran downstairs, secured paper, pen and ink from the landlord and – lacking a writing desk – stood at the cracked marble wash-stand in my room to scrawl a hasty note.

Dearest Father,

I am here in Dover at an inn called the Heart of Oak. Anybody will direct you to it. I could not tolerate the company of La Basilisk one hour longer. So you need not brave her petrifying eye and we may travel straight to London. Please forgive your disobedient but loving daughter.

I didn’t tell him in the note, and never intended to tell him, that the real reason I’d fled the house of my mother’s elder sister was that I couldn’t tolerate her criticisms of him. She’d never forgiven his elopement with my mother and used every opportunity to spray poisonous slime, like a camel spitting.

‘Your father the fortune hunter …’

‘He is not. He had not a penny from my mother.’

‘Your father the Republican …’

‘He’s always said it was wrong to cut off the head of Marie Antoinette.’

‘Your father the gambler …’

‘Do not all gentlemen play games of hazard occasionally?’

She called me argumentative and said I should never get a husband with my sharp tongue.

*

I sealed my scrawled note and was waiting on the steps of the poste restante office as it opened. When I handed it over the counter I asked if there were any more letters waiting for Mr Thomas Lane. Three, the clerk told me, so I knew I hadn’t missed him. I strolled by the harbour for a while, watching the steam packet coming in and passengers disembarking. The novelty of my escape was wearing off now and I was beginning to feel a little lonely. But that was no great matter because soon my father would be with me and a whole new part of my life would be starting. My father had talked about it back in September, nine months before, as he was packing.

‘I’m quite resolved that if I have to leave you again it will be in the care of a husband.’

I was folding his shirts at the time.

‘Indeed. And have you any one in mind?’

‘As yet, no. Have you, Libby?’

‘Indeed I have not.’

‘Sure?’

‘Sure.’

‘Then we can look at the question like two rational beings. You agree it is time you were married?’

‘So people tell me.’

‘You mean the match-making matrons? Don’t pay any heed to them, Libby. They’d have any poor girl married by the time she’s off toddlers’ leading strings. People should be old enough to know their own minds before they marry. Thirty for a man, say, and around twenty-two for a woman.’

I was twenty-one and six months at the time.

‘So I have six months to find a husband?’ I said.

He smiled. ‘Hardly that. In fact, I am proposing that we should leave the whole question on the shelf …’

‘And me on the shelf too?’

‘Exactly that, until I return next summer and we can set about the business in a sensible fashion.’

He must have seen the hurt in my face.

‘Libby, I’m not talking about the marriage market. I’m not proposing you trade your youth and beauty for some fat heir to a discredited peerage.’

‘I don’t think they’d rate higher than the second son of a baronet,’ I said, still defensive.

He came and took my hand.

‘You know me better than that. I’m not a young man any more.’ (He was forty-six years old.) ‘I must think of providing for you in the future. I shan’t die a rich man and Tom has his own way to make.’

‘I’d never be a burden on Tom, you know that.’

‘I’ve not been as much of a father to you as I should. But I have tried to give you the important things in life. Your education has been better than most young women’s. You speak French and German adequately and your musical taste is excellent.’

‘That reminds me, I’ve broken another guitar string.’ I was uneasy at hearing myself praised.

‘And we’ve travelled together. You’ve seen the glaciers of Mont Blanc at sunrise and the Roman Forum by moonlight.’

I was wonderfully fortunate, I knew that. When I was back with my father it was easy to forget the other times, lonely and homesick in a cold French convent, or boarded out with a series of more or less resentful aunts or cousins. It was almost possible, though nowhere near as easy, to forget the glint of my brother’s handkerchief waving from the rail of the ship as it left Gravesend to carry him away to India, and the widening gap of dark water.

‘Couldn’t we just go on as we are?’ I asked. ‘Tom will come back one day and I can keep house for him and you. Do I really need a husband?’

He became serious again. ‘The wish of my heart is to see you married to a man you can love and respect who values and cares for you.’

I watched the steam packet go out again, arching sparks from its funnel and trailing a smell of coal dust. In three hours or so it would be in Calais, then perhaps bringing my father back with it. Around noon I felt weary from my early start and went back to my room. I took off my dress and shoes, loosened my stays and laid down on the bed. I must have dozed because I woke with a start, hearing the landlord’s voice at the bottom of the stairs, saying my name.

‘Miss Liberty Lane? Don’t know about the Liberty, but she called herself Miss Lane, at any rate. Give it me and I’ll take it in to her.’

As his heavy footsteps came upstairs I pulled my dress on and did up some essential buttons, heart thumping because either this was a message from my father or my aunt had tracked me after all. But as soon as the landlord handed me the note – adding his own greasy thumb-print – I knew it had nothing to do with Chalke Bissett. The handwriting was strong and sprawling, a man’s hand. The folded paper was sealed with a plain blob of red wax, and a wedge-shaped impression that might have been made with the end of a penknife, entirely anonymous. I broke the seal and read: … take the liberty of addressing you with distressing …

‘Bad news, miss?’

The landlord was still in the room, his eyes hot and greedy. I gripped the edge of the wash-stand, shaking my head. I think I was acting on instinct only, the way a hurt deer runs.

‘I must go to Calais. When’s the next boat?’

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