An Old Betrayal

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Often in the course of his career as a detective, Lenox had done things that he would never have dreamed of doing outside the context of his vocation. He had picked locks, climbed fences, lied to witnesses — sacrificed many bone-deep integrities upon the altar of an inexact but higher good. These actions almost never cost him any unease.

This one did. When he heard Grace Ammons’s story, the shame she had claimed for herself passed into his ownership. It had been necessary to extract the truth from her — but this was an ugly thing.

She had begun with a heavy sigh. “I was not born in Yorkshire, you are correct,” she said.

“The western part of Sussex, if I had to hazard a guess.”

She inclined her head, in no mood to offer admiration for his deductions. “Yes, in western Sussex, though I thought I had shed my accent. I never knew my parents. My father was a shopowner there, and my mother a woman of gentle birth, rather come down in the world. Both of them died in a fire when I was not three months old. They had scattered the old ashes from their fireplace on the kitchen countertop to scrub it clean, and there was a live cinder among them, which caught on one of the wooden boards there.”

“Where were you?”

“At my grandmother’s house. She took me when there was too much work in the shop. It was she, too, who took care of me after my parents were gone. She was a wonderful woman, my father’s mother, though I just barely remember her. She died when I was seven, my second-to-last living relation. Would that she had lived longer.

“After her death I passed to my father’s sister, my aunt Lily. She was a quiet woman, kind enough when she had the opportunity, but she lived in horror of her husband, my uncle Robert. He was a pious, sober man, with a prosperous farm, but he was a devil — still I believe him to have been the very devil, Mr. Lenox. I will pass over my time in that house, with your permission. I stayed there only until I was fifteen, and that history is not relevant to my current predicament.”

“You may tell the story however you please,” said Lenox. He was on guard, however; her face was so sympathetic, her story already so sad, that he was alert to the possibility that she was manipulating him. “Go on.”

“Growing up in a house that is cruel, I think children either grow to be, as adults, cruel themselves or unusually kind, even soft, perhaps. At any rate, without too much self-regard I can say that I am of the latter sort — I have always been hopelessly soft toward people. It is not necessarily a virtue, I think. One must learn to fight back, and I never did. At fifteen, a very rich, arrogant gentleman, passing through town, took advantage of me.”

“I am sorry to hear it.”

“You asked me for the truth.” She looked down at her hands, folded in her lap, and paused before speaking again. “The usual sequel of such an incident — that the gentleman vanishes, and the girl finds herself with child — did not happen, in this case. In fact, what did happen at the time seemed rather wonderful, to me, childish as I was. He took me out of my aunt and uncle’s house — to Paris. That was the truth I told you, the last time we spoke. I went to Paris.”

“Would I know this person’s name?” asked Lenox.

She shook her head. “I thought him very grand when I was young, but he was not of much account. His father was a very minor squire, the son a spendthrift, shut out of much of the society to which he hoped to win admission. Paris offered him a better chance for that access than London, since the rules are looser there. He was a bad man, though generous to me. He is dead now — died two years ago, in a hunting accident. I read of it in the Times. I had not laid eyes on him for many years before that. We did have happy moments together, he and I.”

“Please go on.”

“My benefactor — as he chose to call himself — arranged for me to have a small suite of apartments in the rue de Verneuil, though he himself lived in the Crillon. He visited me every day and gave me a small amount of money and a maid. I was fifteen, fresh from Sussex. You cannot imagine the sophistication I saw around me. Really, of course, my maid was reporting everything to him, and laughing at me behind my back, and the trinkets I bought with my pocket money were hopelessly vulgar.

“My fortune changed — you may decide whether for the good or the bad — when, at a very threadbare sort of salon in the huitième, I met a woman named Madame de Faurier. She was as glamorous as you can conceive, and very warm to me initially, though ultimately as cold, in her way, as my uncle Robert.”

Lenox felt a kind of sickness — it was so clear what was coming. “I am sorry to make you tell this,” he said.

She ignored this apology. “One day not long after that salon, my gentleman did not appear. I assumed he was ill and sent word around to the Crillon. No reply. At last on the fourth day that he was absent I went to look for him, but he was gone. On the fifth day my maid ceased to come — her weekly wages not having been paid. I was frantic with anxiety, as you can imagine. I knew that my apartments were rented by the month, of which the end was coming soon, and I had scarcely enough money to buy bread. Somehow they knew at the corner that I was alone, because the butcher and costermonger immediately demanded ready money, when I had always bought my food on credit. I imagine the maid told them.

“I am more intelligent about the world now than I was then, Mr. Lenox. In retrospect perhaps I ought to have taken myself to the British Embassy. Certainly I might have fallen upon the mercy of the English church on the Auguste Vacquerie. I think of how young I looked, and imagine they would have taken sympathy on me.

“You will have guessed what happened next, perhaps. A visitor came. Madame de Faurier. I don’t know if my gentleman was complicit with her, or if he had to scramble away from the city and she merely took advantage of the situation. I suspect the former. Anyhow, I came under her protection.”

There were tears in the eyes of Grace Ammons now, and Lenox offered her his handkerchief. On some winter night Lady Jane had stitched his initials in the corner of it with green thread, and passing it across the sofa he thought of his wife, her own tender character. He felt a blackguard. “You needn’t go on,” he said. “Or you may pass over any details you wish.”

She refused the offer. “Within two months I had become a prostitute. A very expensive prostitute — that is the blessing for which I remain thankful,” she said. She looked at him with some bitterness in her wet eyes. “Have you met a prostitute before, Mr. Lenox?”

“They are common enough in my business.”

“Parliament?”

He smiled gently at her joke. “What was my business, I should say. Detection, crime.”

“My counterparts in London are not in the Seven Dials, or by the docks — but in Hyde Park. I had a small pink carriage to myself, and a thirty-minute ride in the Bois de Boulogne with me cost several hundred francs, roughly twenty-five pounds. Of that I received six pounds for myself. The rest went to the carriage, the clothing, Madame de Faurier. You may be sure that I hoarded that six pounds, however — grew wise very quickly, cajoled the gentlemen who visited me for tokens of their esteem…”

Lenox looked up at the far end of the gallery, the invaluable paintings between here and there, the intricate carpet upon which the Queen of England, Empress of India, tread nearly every day, and then back at Grace Ammons. “You are very differently situated these days.”

“I tried desperately never to entertain an Englishman. After a year or two, however, my reputation was such that certain Englishmen offered absurd sums — twice the going rate, three times — for my company, and when Madame du Faurier offered to halve these extra fees with me, I could not resist. One of those gentleman was the Earl of Axford.”

“Ah.”

“Yes. I told you that I returned to London from Paris in the position of secretary to the earl’s wife. I saw your face when I said the name. He is fond of women, true, but whatever the circumstances in which he and I met, he will always have my gratitude. After six or seven evenings together, he finally extracted my whole tale from me — and insisted that I accompany him back to England at once. He made me his household’s secretary, and I showed an aptitude for the work. The rest of my progress I related to you truthfully.”

“What did de Faurier say to your departure?”

She shrugged. “I was not a prisoner. She was extremely upset, however.”

“I ask because I wonder whether she might be involved in this business.”

The young secretary — her face still, after her story, suffused with a preternatural innocence — considered this idea and then rejected it. “I knew her well, Mr. Lenox. She would be capable of murder, I believe, but not of crossing the Channel.”

Lenox paused, thinking. At last, he said, “Then it was this fact from your history with which your blackmailer threatened you, and Mr. Ivory was the reason you wouldn’t go to the police but sought out a detective.”

Her face went lifeless at Ivory’s name, dull and shamed. Her voice remained steady, however. “Yes. I have never deserved George Ivory, but I have been selfish enough to hold on to him. It would hurt him so deeply to know the truth.”

“I am quite sure you deserve him, Miss Ammons,” said Lenox, “and I am sorry to have forced this story from you. At least you may have my word that no other human being shall hear it from me.”

“Not Jenkins?”

“He will trust me when I vouchsafe the honesty of your story.”

“Thank you,” she said and then, lowering her face out of Lenox’s sight, began to cry.