‘Does she know?’ I asked, swivelling round to look at him, appalled for all three of them.
James shook his head. ‘I can’t blame him. His father is a clergyman so he believes we were heading for hell fire,’ he said with a bitter twist of his lips.
‘Did you love him?’
He shrugged, which was probably a Yes.
There wasn’t much to say to that. Nothing that wasn’t a platitude, anyway. I put down my mug and curled up against his side, tipped my head so it rested against his shoulder and concentrated on sending good vibes. After a moment I felt the weight of his head against mine as he relaxed. Did his blighted love life mean he was celibate at the moment? It would make him safer if he was, but this was a healthy young Georgian male, not a heartsick girl. I doubted that he’d renounced sex.
James fell asleep, I sat there, wide awake, chasing theories and facts and supposition round and round with absolutely no results at all.
Chapter Seven
James woke when the front door banged closed and Luc and Garrick came in. He was obviously one of the lucky kind who wake from naps refreshed, not woolly-headed, because he sat up alertly with no sign of his earlier melancholy.
Garrick looked subtlety different, a lot more dangerous somehow. No-one would take him for a gentleman’s gentleman, yet he was wearing exactly what he had when I last saw him. The body language between him and Luc was different too. I had seen it before when they were investigating, or there was danger – the master/servant relationship changed into something quite different. They were equals, friends, somehow.
‘What have you two been up to?’ I asked. ‘I thought you were off on estate business, Luc.’
‘I was, and some very tedious disputes over leases have been resolved. Then we went and leaned a little on Bromley.’
‘Doctor Talbot’s man? Any results?’
Luc subsided into his favourite chair and Garrick, without being asked, took one on the other side of the hearth. ‘Nothing to the point. He is adamant that Talbot had not seemed worried or alarmed in the past few weeks. He was certainly not taking precautions against attack.’
‘How could he tell?’ James got up and went to stare at the incident board. ‘Talbot was a pretty imperturbable sort.’
‘Apparently a few months back a lady he had been attending in the early stages of pregnancy developed an infatuation for him. The husband found out and made threats and Talbot employed an ex-Runner as a bodyguard for a month and gave Bromley a whole list of instructions about security – checking the locks, not admitting strangers however plausible their reasons were, and so forth. The husband calmed down, the bodyguard is not on the payroll any longer, but Bromley stuck with the security precautions.’
‘Was Talbot bisexual?’ I asked Jame
s. ‘Or were the lady’s instincts completely off-target?’
‘Attracted to both men and women?’ James clarified. Apparently that was another phrase that wasn’t in use. ‘No. Definitely not. But he was a good-looking man and had a very sympathetic manner.’
I remembered the battered head and blood-streaked face and suppressed a shudder. ‘I suppose a woman who was innocent of the range of sexual desire and who might not be feeling very well could develop an attraction to someone who was concerned about them, even if they gave her no encouragement. Especially if her husband wasn’t being understanding about the impact of pregnancy. I had a friend whose husband was a complete ass when she had bad morning sickness. Kept saying it was all in her mind. Why she didn’t hit him with a poker and run off with someone else I’ll never know.’
‘Still might have been something like that,’ Garrick observed. ‘But possibly the doctor did not realise someone was infatuated and that her husband knew of it.’
‘That leaves his entire patient list, almost.’ I got up and added a sheet headed Possibly Infatuated Patients to the murder boards. ‘I hope you don’t expect me to visit every pregnant member of the ton to enquire about their romantic fantasies or ask whether their husband is murderously jealous.’ The three of them looked at me. ‘Oh, for goodness sake! Yes, it is a perfectly sensible line of enquiry but …’
‘But we do have access to the ledgers that list the legitimate patients, the ones whose husbands would know they are seeing a doctor,’ James said. ‘Difficult to be murderously jealous of a situation you aren’t aware of, so perhaps we could eliminate whoever is in the coded files. If we could read them.’
‘Yes…’ I agreed cautiously. ‘But what about someone who discovers their wife or daughter’s secret? That would be another group that Talbot wouldn’t have protected against because he thought they would have no idea.’
Luc made the kind of noise usually written down as Aargh. ‘Even so, I think it would be worthwhile going through the uncoded ledgers for the past two years and listing everyone who might have fallen for him.’
‘Might? How can one tell?’ I had a good idea who it was who was going to be ploughing through those pages.
‘I don’t pretend to understand the working of the female mind,’ Luc began and got a sofa cushion right in the face. He threw it back and I caught it. ‘But I would suggest it would take more than one appointment to develop such feelings and possibly the kind of ailment or problem that might require sympathetic discussion. Not, for example, making someone happy by announcing that they were pregnant with a wanted child, for example.’
‘That’s true,’ I admitted. ‘Do we fetch the ledgers here?’
‘No, better not to remove them. The coded ones no-one knew about, but taking the open ones could give rise to all kinds of questions. You had best work on them at Talbot’s house.’
Wonderful. Travel through time to Georgian London and experience the thrill of spending hours poring over medical files in a stuffy office...
‘OK.’ Eyebrows went up. ‘I mean, very well.’ A pity I wasn’t an historian who could get a fascinating paper on early nineteenth century gynaecological disorders out of it.