The Dark Enquiry Read Online Free PDF Page B

me an exaggerated wink. “I am your man,” she promised. “Where will you be whilst I am pretending to attend you at the Mortlakes’?”
    “I shall be staying with Lady Bettiscombe,” I informed her. Portia had agreed to supply me with a bolthole and any other necessities I should require.
    “And what shall you give me to ensure I do not relate that information to Mr. Brisbane or Mr. Plum should they ask it of me?”
    I squawked at her. “You cannot seriously think you can extort money from me to purchase your silence!”
    She gave me a calm, slow-lidded blink. “It might be worth rather a lot to your plans to keep me silent, and I think it is not the job of a lady’s maid to enter into intrigues.”
    I smothered a bit of profanity I had learned from Brisbane and rummaged in my reticule. “Five pounds. That is all, and for that, you will persuade everyone— everyone —that I am rusticating in the country.”
    I brandished the note in front of her, and her eyes lit with avarice. “Oh, yes, my lady! I will make them all believe it, even if I have to lie to the queen herself,” she promised.
    “Good.” She reached for the banknote and I held it just out of reach. At the last moment, I tore it sharply in half and gave one of the halves to her.
    “What bloody use is this?” she demanded.
    “Do not swear,” I told her. “Aunt Hermia would be most disappointed if I told her you still spoke like a guttersnipe.”
    “If you don’t want me to swear, don’t steal my bloody money,” she returned bitterly.
    I tucked the other half of the note into my reticule.
    “You may have the other half when the task is completed to my satisfaction. If you exchange both halves at the bank, they will give you a crisp new banknote in its place,” I informed her. She brightened.
    “I suppose that’s all right then,” she conceded. “Mind you don’t lose the other half.”
    “Shall I give it to the Tower guards to look after with the Crown Jewels?” I asked.
    She waggled a finger at me. “I shall speak to God about that tongue of yours, as well.”
    “Do, Morag, I beg you.”

The THIRD CHAPTER
     
    I had the gift, and arrived at the technique
That called up spirits from the vasty deep…
     
    —“The Witch of Endor” Anthony Hecht
     
     
    With my maid and my trunk safely dispatched to the country and my web of lies coming along nicely, I took myself off to my sister’s house on foot, approaching through the back garden. I thought to make an unobtrusive entrance, but when I arrived, I found the entire household standing outside, admiring a cow. A man stood at the head, holding its halter and nudging its nose towards a box of hay.
    Portia waved me over to where she stood with Jane the Younger and Nanny Stone.
    “Isn’t she divine?” Portia crooned.
    I sighed. “Yes, she is quite the loveliest baby,” I assured her, although truth be told, she had the rather unformed look of most children that age, and I suspected she would be much handsomer in another year or two.
    “Not the baby,” she sniffed. “The cow.”
    I turned to where the pretty little Jersey was being brushed as it munched a mouthful of fresh hay. “Yes, delightful. Why, precisely, do you have a cow in London?”
    “For the baby, of course. Jane the Younger will require milk in a few months, and I mean to be ready. She cannot have city milk,” she informed me with the lofty air of certainty I had observed in most new mothers. “City milk is poison.”
    I said nothing. Portia could be rabid upon the subject of the infant’s health and I had learned the hard way not to offer an opinion on any matter that touched the baby unless it concurred with hers in every particular. In this case, I could not entirely fault her. Adulterated milk had been discovered in some of the best shops, much of it little better than chalky water and full of nasty things. It was difficult to believe that in a city as grand as London we should resort to keeping cows in