A Corpse in Shining Armour. Caro Peacock

is Adam’s Mews. Carriage horses are stabled all along the cobbled street. Grooms and drivers live overhead, some in rooms so low-ceilinged that even jockey-sized people can’t stand upright in them, with hay stores in between and pulleys for drawing up hay bales from the carts that are so often blocking the narrow mews. There was one standing there that afternoon. I managed to squeeze past it without snagging my dress and went through the gateway into Abel Yard.

      The carriage-mender at the entrance to the yard had the forge roaring and was hammering at something on his anvil. Chickens scratched around the door at the bottom of our staircase. The door was locked, which meant Mrs Martley was out. Good. Mrs Martley might, I suppose, be described as my housekeeper, except I’m not grand enough to have a housekeeper and she’s far too opinionated to be one. A more accurate description might be that she’s my resident respectability. A woman can’t live on her own and keep up any reputation, especially if, like me, she sometimes has gentleman callers. Mrs Martley, a retired midwife in her forties, cooked and cleaned and nagged me about everything from forgetting to hang up my bonnet to still being single at twenty-three years old. As I was fumbling in my reticule for my key, something jogged my elbow.

      ‘Enerunds?’

      The girl Tabby had appeared from nowhere, standing there in her old stableman’s cap, her assortment of shawls that never varied, winter or summer, her stockingless feet in shapeless boots too large for her. She was, I guessed, around fourteen or fifteen years old and slept in a shed next to the cows at the end of the yard on piles of sacks and old blankets. As far as she made a living, it was doing small jobs for dwellers in the yard. She’d just asked me if I had any errands for her. I thought quickly.

      ‘Would you run along to the baker’s and see if there are any loaves left. Here’s sixpence. Keep the change for yourself.’

      Her eyes glinted. She took the coin and ran off, boots flopping, before I could change my mind.

      I found my key, unlocked the door and walked upstairs to our parlour. There was a note from Mrs Martley on the table: Have gone round to Mr Suter’s. Your supper is in the meat safe. Better still. My best friend, Daniel Suter, had married a dancer named Jenny the year before. Mrs Martley had expected me to marry him and was furious. With me, not with him. Then Jenny had done the only thing that could redeem her in Mrs Martley’s eyes and become pregnant. All Mrs Martley’s professional instincts, as well as her kindness, had been aroused. She now spent as much time at their rooms in Bloomsbury as she did at Abel Yard. I hoped Daniel and Jenny were grateful. I knew I was.

      I went on, up a narrower flight of stairs, into a room that was one of the delights of my life. The afternoon sun gleamed on the white walls, scattered here and there with rainbows, from the light filtering through a glass mermaid that I’d hung in the window. My second-hand couch, newly upholstered in blue to match the curtains, stood by the window. I knelt on it as I took off my bonnet, enjoying the view over waves of gleaming roof tiles with pigeons basking in the sun, to the tops of the trees in Hyde Park. Besides the couch, I had a trunk and a row of pegs for my clothes, a set of shelves overflowing with my books, a cheval mirror, a table to write on. There were still a few strawberries left in the chip punnet on my table, an extravagance from yesterday. I took off my gloves and ate them, then rummaged under the bookcase for the box where I kept my accounts. It took only a few minutes to establish what I was nearly sure of in any case–that if I wanted to keep my precarious comforts, I couldn’t afford to turn down a case as profitable as this one might be. That was true enough, but only an excuse. I’d known before I’d left Mr Disraeli that his appeal to my curiosity had been successful, and he knew it too.

      The events at the jousting practice two days later only increased my curiosity. As it happened, I had another social engagement that evening after I came back from the Eyre Arms. Often weeks might pass when I didn’t go to functions except on business, but this was June, with the season at its height. An embossed invitation card had come from a former pianoforte pupil of mine, an aristocratic young married woman whom I didn’t care for greatly, who had decided that my efforts weren’t on a par with her genius. I’d heard she’d found herself a professor instead. She now intended to delight the world with a soirée of Chopin and Miss Liberty Lane was cordially invited. I didn’t much look forward to it, but my career as an investigator was not so secure that I could ignore an event which might provide rich pupils.

      When I got home after returning Rancie to the stables I warmed a pan of water for a good all-over wash, then dressed in my new ribbed silk, the colour of bluebells. It had two rows of lace down the bodice and wonderful sleeves that puffed out from shoulder to elbow, then came tight to the wrist with a row of three silk-covered buttons. It was a struggle doing up the buttons on the right sleeve with my left hand, even with the help of a button-hook, but when I looked in the mirror I knew it had been worth it. The event was in Knightsbridge and I’d decided to walk there across the park to save a cab fare, so I tucked a cloth into my reticule to give my shoes a surreptitious wipe before I faced the front door and footman.

      My former pupil hadn’t improved greatly as a pianist, only added a layer of affectation to her modest competence. I sat there in her over-decorated drawing room on an uncomfortable gilt chair, wishing I hadn’t come. Then, in a pause between nocturnes, a woman’s voice hissed from the row behind.

      ‘Elizabeth.’

      It seemed to be directed at me, even though it wasn’t my name. I ignored it. It came again, more urgently, actually in a note’s rest in the music. I turned round and saw a face I’d never expected to see again. A lovely face, framed in red-gold hair dressed with a rope of creamy pearls, a little fuller than when I’d last seen it two years ago, cheeks soft as peaches. Celia. When she saw she had my attention, she beckoned and flicked her eyes towards the room next door. She thought we should get up there and then, in mid-nocturne, and go and talk. She always had been impatient. I put a finger to my lips, tried to sign wait and turned round, but I could feel her eyes on the back of my neck, hear the silk hiss of her dress as she fidgeted.

      I sat oblivious of the music, hurled back suddenly to a time I revisited as seldom as possible. Celia and I belonged in different worlds. She had a rich husband who adored her, a London house and a country estate. She was as good natured as a child and just as self-centred, without a thought in her lovely head about society, art, politics or anything outside her own circle. In spite of that, and even after a gap of two years, there was something that bound us as closely as sisters. I’d met her at the lowest point in my life, a few hours after I learned my father had been murdered, and she’d been kind. The events of the weeks that followed had deprived her, too, of people she’d loved. I’d played a part in that. I knew I wasn’t to blame. Or if there had been any blame at all, I’d cancelled the debt by helping her elope to a marriage that even London gossip admitted had become a by-word for happiness. I’d been pleased when I heard that. If I’d wanted to meet her again, it could have been arranged easily enough, but I was scared of the feelings that meeting her might bring back. There was no help for it now, though. When the music finished at last, she was waiting at the end of my row.

      ‘Elizabeth! I don’t believe it.’

      She’d first known me under an assumed name, and although I’d told her my real one she’d never managed to remember it. The soft lisp was still there in her voice, the grace in the way she moved. She was wearing pale apricot silk with a wide sash in a darker tone. A triple necklace of pearls and diamonds gleamed against her skin. She put her hand on my arm, laughing at the wonder of it.

      ‘Where have you been? What have you been doing? I’ve been thinking about you so much since…since that night.’

      The night I’d helped her elope. The night I’d seen her brother die. Her brother had killed my father. Celia would never know that. If she’d tried, she could have found me over the last two years, but Celia lived by impulse and didn’t look far under the surface of things. There was nothing but pleasure at seeing me again in her voice and face, no tension in the hand on my arm.

      A slow tide of people was carrying us towards the next room where refreshments were laid out. She kept her hand where it was, talking all the way.

      ‘It really is a miracle.