Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [44]
‘I’m not even sure it’s proper for you to receive me in such a state,’ she said. ‘We’re not married yet.’
‘My dear, you gave me little time to consider propriety.’
She humphed in the back of her mouth, but did not endeavour to move her face. Sometimes, she affected expressionlessness.
‘How was the Criterion?’
‘Delightful,’ she said, obviously not meaning it. The Churchward mouth turned down at the corners, a smile becoming a threat in an instant.
‘You are angry with me?’
‘I think I have a right to be, dear-heart,’ she said, with a moue of reasonableness. ‘Last night was fixed some weeks ahead. You knew it was to be important.’
‘My duties...’
‘I wished to show you off before our friends, before society. Instead, I was humiliated.’
‘I hardly think Florence or Art would allow that.’
Bairstow returned and left the coffee things – a ceramic pot rather than silver – on the table. Penelope poured herself a cupful, then tipped in milk and sugar, not pausing in her critique of his behaviour.
‘Lord Godalming was charming, as usual. No, the humiliation to which I refer was inflicted by Kate’s dreadful uncle.’
‘Diarmid Reed? The newspaperman?’
Penelope nodded sharply. ‘The villain exactly. He had the nerve – in public, mind you – to suggest that you’d been seen in the company of policemen in some horrid, sordid nether region of the city.’
‘Whitechapel?’
She gulped hot coffee. ‘That’s the very place. How absurd, how cruel, how...’
‘True, I’m afraid. I thought I saw Reed. I must ask him if he has any thoughts.’
‘Charles!’ A tiny muscle in Penelope’s throat pulsed. She set down her cup, but left her little finger crooked.
‘There is no accusation, Penelope. I have been in Whitechapel on the business of the Diogenes Club.’
‘Oh, them.’
‘Indeed, and their business is also, as you know, that of the Queen and her ministers.’
‘I doubt that the safety of the realm or the well-being of the Queen is one whit advanced by having you trail around with the lower orders, sniffing out the sites of sensational atrocities.’
‘I can’t discuss my work, even with you. You know that.’
‘Indeed,’ she sighed. ‘Charles, I’m sorry. It’s just that... well, that I’m proud of you, and I thought I deserved the opportunity to display you a little, to let the envious look at my ring, to draw their own conclusions.’
Her anger melted away, and she became again the fond girl he had courted. Pamela had been possessed of a temper, as well. He remembered Pam horse-whipping a blackguard of a corporal who was found to have interfered with the bhisti’s sister. The quality of her anger had been different, though; spurred by actual wrongs done to another, rather than imagined slights against herself.
‘I have been talking with Art.’
Penelope was working up to something, Beauregard realised. He knew the symptoms. One of them was a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.
‘It’s about Florence,’ she said. ‘Mrs Stoker. We must drop her.’
Beauregard was astounded.
‘I beg your pardon? She’s a bit of a bore at times, but she means well. We’ve known her for years.’
He had thought Florence to be Penelope’s closest ally. Indeed, Mrs Stoker had been highly instrumental in contriving occasions on which the couple were left alone together so that a proposal might be elicited. When Penelope’s mother had been sick with a fever, Florence had insisted on taking charge.
‘It is all the more important that we should openly distance ourselves from her. Art says...’
‘Is this Godalming’s idea?’
‘No, it’s mine,’ she said, deliberately. ‘I can have ideas of my own, you know. Art has told me something of Mr Stoker’s affairs...’
‘Poor Bram.’
‘Poor Bram! The man is a traitor to the Queen you profess to serve. He has been hauled off to a work camp for his own good and may be executed at any moment.’
Beauregard had supposed as much. ‘Does Art know where Bram is being held? What is his situation?’
Penelope waved the enquiry aside as irrelevant. ‘Sooner or later, Florence must fall too. If only by association.’
‘I