The Counterfeit Heiress: A Lady Emily Mystery (Lady Emily Mysteries) Read online

  One might easily imagine that a gentleman in Monsieur Lamar’s position had chosen his second wife with little regard for love. Having been made a widower once, he must be forgiven for refusing to risk his heart another time. He was, as he often said, excessively fond of the new Madame Lamar. She was a pretty little thing, petite and curvy, with a quick wit and generous nature, and it could not be denied that her husband felt a passionate attraction to her, at least until the ravages of time began to erode the youthful beauty that he had once found so appealing. He still treated her with care and respect, but Madame Lamar, so many years younger than he, craved adoration, and as her husband could not provide her with that, she insisted on having it from her daughter.

  Estella needed no convincing. Her mother was a vision of loveliness and told the most exciting stories. Nurse was boring as anything, so Estella took to hiding in a nursery cupboard as often as possible. Monsieur Lamar might have found this odd had it ever been brought to his attention, but as he never ventured to the nursery and didn’t speak to the nurse when she brought Estella down for her daily quarter of an hour visit with her parents, his daughter’s peculiar habits were wholly unknown to him. Madame Lamar thought Estella’s cupboard charming, and ordered the nurse to fit it out for the child so that it might be a more comfortable hiding place. Nurse removed the lowest shelf, covered the small floor with a soft bit of carpet, and placed a child-sized stool in the corner. In the opposite corner, Estella stored a little silver box covered with engraved flowers, given to her by her mother to house treasures. When Madame Lamar inquired as to why the box remained empty more than a year after she had presented it to her daughter, Estella explained that as she was unable to capture the stories her mother told her, there was nothing precious enough to go inside. Madame Lamar could not have been more charmed and suggested that Estella start telling stories of her own to the dolls Monsieur Lamar gave to the child every month.

  Until then, Estella had never taken particular notice of the dolls with their porcelain faces and elaborate dresses. Now that her mother had anointed them as Worthwhile, Estella looked at them from an entirely new point of view. She chose the ones she liked the best, preferring ones with eyes the same hue of emerald as her own, and allowed these favorites to sit in her cupboard with her. Her mother had erred in only one way, by suggesting Estella could invent wonderful stories. Why would Estella even try when she already knew by heart the best ones? She told her mother’s stories to the dolls, over and over. They proved a good audience.

  Madame Lamar happily indulged the child until she reached an age when moving in society became necessary. When Estella resisted attending parties and dances, her mother offered no sympathy. Madame Lamar wanted to be adored in public, and if her husband was not up to the job, she believed her daughter ought to rise to the occasion. Estella had no wish to disappoint her mother, and when she realized what it was her mother required, she did her best to satisfy her, but the girl proved too awkward to be of much use. Madame Lamar longed for her to shine socially, to be a belle, to have the brightest and best men in France vying for her affections, all the while noticing that the young lady standing before them could never have been so remarkable if it were not for her extraordinary mother. Estella was to be Madame Lamar’s crowning glory.

  This, alas, was not to be. Estella rarely made eye contact with anyone other than her mother. She never knew what to say to men when they attempted a flirtation. Once, at a ball, she started to tell one of her mother’s stories, one Estella had repeated often to her dolls, and was crushed when the group around her burst into laughter. Cécile du Lac, a young lady her age, whom Estella’s mother had coaxed her time and time again to befriend, stepped forward and scolded the group.

  “If you ingrates are incapable of realizing Mademoiselle Lamar is telling you something of great importance to her, you do not deserve her company.” With that, Cécile took Estella by the arm and marched her out of the room and into the grand hall of the house. “They are reprehensible, the lot of them. Is your mother insisting that you, too, marry? I hate the very idea of marriage, but can no longer avoid it. You must come to my wedding next month. I can promise you copious amounts of champagne.”

  That had cemented their friendship, although Estella had never quite managed to admit to Cécile that marriage wasn’t the only thing she wanted to avoid. Cécile had taken her up, and for now that would suffice to satisfy her mother. When, soon after the wedding, Cécile’s husband died, Estella used her friend’s grief to persuade her mother that after witnessing such a tragedy she should be allowed to wait a little longer before entering into an engagement of her own. Her mother never need know Cécile did not miss her husband in the least, and by the time Estella would have had to start taking seriously her parents’ efforts to see her married, the issue had become moot. Typhoid took them both from her in the span of a single week.

  2

  I left Cécile in the very capable hands of the Duke of Devonshire, grabbed Jeremy by the arm, and shoved him in front of me so that he might clear a path through the crowd as we searched for the woman we now believed to be an ersatz Estella. We saw her go up the garden stairs and back into the house, but could not reach her before she had disappeared into the ballroom. I caught a glimpse of her as she slipped out of the room and did my best to catch her, but was unable to get close enough.

  “She’s gone,” Jeremy said. I had sent him running ahead to the front of the house to inquire if she had been witnessed leaving. “The servants say she went on foot, but it’s entirely possible her carriage is waiting outside in the crush. The street is all but blocked.”

  “Then we need to search every carriage,” I said. I felt a hand on my back and turned to see my husband.

  “What trouble are the two of you causing?” he asked, his countenance growing serious as he listened to my story and shook his head. “The carriages are unlikely to prove of any use. Even if one of them belongs to her, it would not be able to move and she would have had no choice but to continue on foot if escape was her goal. No doubt she is already in a hansom cab headed no one knows where.”

  I might have objected to Colin’s dismissal of my idea that we search the carriages were he not the most skilled and trusted agent at the Crown’s disposal. The queen quite depended on him whenever pesky matters cropped up requiring a discreet sort of investigation, and although there were few things about which Her Majesty and I agreed, Colin’s talents were one of them. “Quite,” I said. “What do you suggest?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “A woman comes into a costume ball pretending to be someone she is not. What is the crime? If anything, she has admirably stuck to the spirit of the evening.”

  “She is pretending to be someone invited as a guest,” I said. “That is a far cry from turning up in an ironic costume.”

  “Devonshire thought it was a coup to lure the mysterious Estella Lamar to his party,” Jeremy said. “I can’t imagine he would have welcomed an imposter into his home.”

  Colin frowned. “The duchess may have thought it was a coup. I can assure you it was of no significance to Devonshire. I should not be shocked to learn that the duchess planned the whole thing as a nice bit of theater for her party. Do you really think someone like Estella Lamar, who busies herself exploring the world, would have the slightest interest in a fancy dress ball?”

  I sighed. “Perhaps you are right.”

  “I never thought I would agree with any of your deductions, Hargreaves,” Jeremy said. “It always astonishes me when you prove useful.”

  “Is that so?” Colin asked. “Then astonish me by proving your own self useful, Bainbridge. Dance with my wife. I’ve never been able to tolerate a quadrille.”

  * * *

  “Cécile may never forgive you,” I said as my husband untied the long ribbon, embroidered with the Greek key, that crossed the bodice of my dress and wrapped around my waist.

  “I rushed straight to her side, offered to spirit her home and call fo
r a doctor. How have I not taken adequate care of her? She chose to stay at the party. If anything, I may find it difficult to forgive her for barring us from making an early exit. I told you I had no desire to stay until dawn.”

  “She is worried about her friend,” I said, placing over the back of a chair the delicate silver ivy that had hung from my waist. Colin removed my headdress. “She did not need anything further from you regarding her own self, but she does want us to look into the matter of the woman impersonating Estella Lamar.”

  “I do not wish to speak of it.” He fiddled with the pins in my hair, causing it to spill in masses of unruly waves over my shoulders. “Come to think of it, there is nothing of which I wish to speak at the moment.” He bent over and kissed my neck and I knew distracting him from his purpose would be folly. Deciding this purpose was far more interesting than any conversation, I tugged at his cravat, and was silently cursing Beau Brummell for adopting such complicated knots, when a sharp knock on the door brought us both to attention.

  “Mr. Hargreaves, sir, Davis here.” Our butler never opened my bedroom door without first announcing himself. “A footman has come from the Duke of Devonshire. His Grace requires you most urgently. I am afraid a guest at his party has turned up dead. Murdered, sir. I assume I need say nothing more.”

  We were out the door almost at once. Rosy-fingered dawn had already begun to streak the sky as we returned to Devonshire House, where the duke, after a brief and private chat with my husband, thanked me for not being angry at our having been disturbed at such an antisocial hour and then left us to our work. He showed no surprise that I had accompanied my husband. My reputation had preceded me, and he knew full well I would have my piece of the investigation; I had proved myself too many times in the past for it to be any other way. Colin explained the situation to me as soon as we were free from our host, who, despite accepting my having a role, had not felt personally comfortable discussing murder with a lady. The body of a middle-aged woman had been found, not in his grounds, but more than a mile away, her clothing, or rather, her costume, giving her away as a guest of the duke’s. The police had come to Devonshire House in the hope of identifying her, but here the duke had failed them. All he could tell them was that he had believed her to be Estella Lamar until Cécile du Lac had corrected his error. He had thought it best to summon Colin at once. The family, he had explained, did not desire any part in a scandal. Neither he nor the duchess had the slightest idea as to the truth about their mysterious guest, and they were eager to have the matter separated from them and their home as quickly as possible.

  Colin directed our carriage to Lambeth Bridge, where members of Scotland Yard met us. They frowned when they saw me but kept their thoughts silent as they led us to a sad scene near the grounds of St. Mary’s School. The body, still dressed in the robes of Artemis so similar to my own, lay crumpled in a heap underneath a tree.

  “This rather changes the situation,” I said. “Perhaps Cécile is right to be concerned about her friend.” We inspected the poor woman’s remains—she had been stabbed in the neck—and then I left Colin to examine the rest of the scene while I went straight back home to wake up Cécile. Ordinarily, she insisted on sleeping until at least eleven, but when I arrived in Park Lane a bit before nine, she was already up, dressed, and breakfasted. Cécile had never been the sort of lady who put on airs or needed coddling. She took the news of the death of Estella’s would-be doppelgänger without so much as a Gallic shrug, called for the carriage, and demanded that we go to her friend’s house at once.

  “Estella Lamar lives in London?” I asked as the carriage crossed through Mayfair toward Belgravia. “Wouldn’t it have been simpler to call on her there than to wait to see her at a ball?”

  “Estella has never liked uninvited callers,” Cécile said. “Furthermore, it seems unlikely that she spends much time in residence here, given her proclivity for travel. I had no reason to think it possible to find her in London until I learned last night she was supposed to be at the ball.”

  The Lamar mansion—for it could be called nothing short of that—covered the better part of a block not far from Belgrave Square. An ornate gilded iron gate blocked from the street the imposing edifice, a masterpiece of Georgian architecture, and we were admitted to the house by a liveried servant without having to wait. Once inside, the butler seemed almost too eager to assist us.

  “I am terribly sorry,” he said, “but Mademoiselle Lamar is not at home.”

  “Not at home because she is not in residence or not at home because she is not seeing visitors?” I asked. “Please do not trifle with me—”

  “Milady, I would be most distraught if you thought I would dare trifle with you. Mademoiselle Lamar is not in residence, nor has she been for some time. Are you closely acquainted with her?”

  “You are impertinent for a butler,” Cécile said, narrowing her eyes and nodding. “I find it surprisingly endearing.”

  “I beg your forgiveness, milady.” He bowed, twice. “I only meant to inquire in the hopes that you might have knowledge of our mistress’s plans. Her lengthy absence has left all of us below stairs a bit rusty, I suppose. If you are close to her, you might know when she will grace this house once again with her presence.”

  “When was she last here?” I asked.

  “Oh, milady, I could hardly say.”

  “Try,” Cécile said.

  “I mean no disrespect,” he said, bowing again. “It was … let me see … old Monsieur Lamar and his wife died in 1875. Mademoiselle was here only briefly while she was in mourning, so I suppose we haven’t seen her more than that one time since she took possession of the house.”

  “She has not been here in more than twenty years?” I asked.

  “That is correct, milady.”

  “Yet she means to keep the house?”

  “So far as we can tell, milady.”

  Cécile and I exchanged confused glances. “The house does not appear to be shut up,” I said. “Are all the rooms open?”

  “Yes, Mademoiselle Lamar gave clear directions when she inherited that the house was to be fully staffed and ready for her arrival at all times.”

  “You are not working with a skeleton staff?” I asked.

  “No, milady.”

  “And you have been in this mode for two decades without anyone living above stairs?” To call this situation unusual would be to grossly underestimate it. Families often spent long periods of time away from their town homes—although two decades was an extreme absence—but they always had the servants close up the houses when they were away. Furniture and paintings were covered, curtains drawn, and only the barest staff left on board wages to ensure nothing dire happened while their masters were away.

  “That is correct.”

  “Does she keep in contact with you?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, she has always been a conscientious mistress,” the butler said. “She sends a letter from nearly every stop in her travels. We had one from Siam not two months ago.”

  “Siam?” Cécile asked. “May I be so bold as to ask to see this letter? I have known Mademoiselle Lamar since my youth and am most interested.”

  “Then you no doubt are all too aware of her concerns about King Chulalongkorn’s interactions with the west. She does not want the Siamese to lose any bit of their native culture.”

  “Is that so?” Cécile asked. “How very like Mademoiselle Lamar.”

  “If you would allow me to lead you to a sitting room, I shall gladly share the letter with you.”

  Once he had left us alone in a pretty—if dated—room covered in William Morris paper and furnished in comfortable and attractive fashion, Cécile and I scrutinized Estella’s letter. She did indeed mention concerns about the Siamese king’s relationship with western powers, and she gave a wonderfully newsy account of her arrival in the country, more newsy than one would expect a lady to write to her butler. Furthermore, she gave almost no direction regarding her wishes for the kee
ping of the house.

  “Estella was never like that,” Cécile said. “Inappropriately friendly with servants?”

  “It is highly unusual,” I said. “Do you recognize her handwriting?”

  “So far as I can remember, yes,” Cécile said. “I have had letters from her, but not more than one or two every year.”

  “Do you write back to her?” I asked.

  “Yes, although I suspect she does not always receive my replies as she rarely responds to anything in them. Travel can make that sort of thing difficult. One often misses one’s post, and Estella might not have always left a forwarding address.”

  “Quite.” I rang for the butler. “Were you aware that your mistress had responded to an invitation from the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire? Apparently she intended to appear at their ball last night.”

  “Why, we have heard nothing, milady,” he said. “That letter is the last we have had and you can see for yourself she made no mention of such a plan. Surely she didn’t come to London and not stay in the house?”

  “No, that seems unlikely,” I said. “However, someone else, an imposter, came to the ball claiming to be Miss Lamar. Have you had any contact with such a person?”

  “I can assure you not,” he said, pulling himself up straight. “None of us in the house would ever stand for a pretender. We are all so very fond of Mademoiselle Lamar, you see.”

  “How long have you been in her employ?” I asked.

  “Her father hired me when he married the second Madame Lamar.”

  “So you knew Estella as a child?” Cécile asked.

  “Yes, milady. That is why we all feel so, well, if I may speak freely?”