‘No, I do not. But he is an insufferable man and I am very tempted to hit him with a statue or drown him in that urn there,’ I retorted and gave Lucian a nudge towards the door through which people were beginning to wander in search of the tea, plain cake and orgeat – whatever that was – which were apparently the mainstay of Almack’s refreshments. ‘Take me in so I can try the orgeat.’
‘Orgeat? Are you certain?’ Lucian offered his arm.
‘I am going to look at that mirror.’
‘Do not try and go through it until I get back. Behave normally,’ he cautioned as he made for the table in the far corner.
I found the mirror and pretended to fix my earing, which gave me the opportunity to get my nose really close to the glass. Nothing. My breath misted the surface, reflections of people passing behind me looked perfectly normal.
‘It looks like any ordinary mirror tonight.’ Lucian appeared behind me, a glass in one hand. ‘Here you are.’
I took an incautious gulp and put the glass down. Orgeat, it turned out, is a sort of barley water with almonds infused in it. Absolutely non-alcoholic and distinctly odd and cloying.
The mirror glittered with reflected light. I stared at it and suddenly it misted, patchily, as though with someone’s invisible breath. I reached out and again there was the sensation of slight yielding, like touching plastic that had become hot in the sun. Then the mist drifted away and under my fingertips was nothing but hard glass. ‘This is the way, I’m sure of it,’ I said. ‘But it isn’t ready to let me through yet.’
The room was hot, noisy and, increasingly, sweaty. Almack’s was beginning to seem less enticing by the minute, or perhaps it was the panicky feeling in the pit of my stomach when the mirror refused to cooperate.
‘Can we go?’ I asked. ‘It is mission accomplished as far as Wraxall is concerned. I don’t think he knows anything about what has happened to Arabella.’
Lucian said something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like damn, but he took my arm and began to steer a way out through the in-coming refreshment seekers.
It took almost half an hour to retrieve our evening cloaks and Lucian’s hat, summon the carriage and travel the few hundred yards back to Albany. By then all I wanted was my bed. Alone. What with the ever-present niggles of desire for Lucian, panic over being trapped and terror at the thought of suddenly blinking out of existence because I had disrupted the flow of time, or whatever it was, I was in no mood for company.
Everything looked rather better in the morning light and, by some miracle, when I walked into breakfast all ready to report on Lord Wraxall Lucian was in the mood to talk too, without a sign of the newspaper barricade.
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‘You said that you did not believe Wraxall had anything to do with Arabella’s disappearance,’ he said when I had chosen my breakfast and was buttering toast.
‘He is a complete little toad, arrogant and snobbish and prejudiced. But he spoke quite openly about Arabella’s behaviour when she turned down his proposal. He is amazed at his own poor judgment in even considering honouring her with his offer, but he seems to dismiss it as all the fault of her poor, feeble female intellect. I think he is one of those people who conveniently rewrites unpleasant situations in their head.
‘He is undoubtedly very intelligent – and completely without common sense or any grasp of other people’s thoughts and emotions. He tolerated me because I stood up to him and I was a novelty. But he drifted off, very rudely, the moment he became bored with me.’
‘So you asked him directly about her?’ Lucian attacked a seriously underdone hunk of beef and I looked away, thinking longingly of a bowl of granola and yoghurt with fresh fruit.
‘I said it was a bore listening to you and your friends worrying endlessly about her. And he said that he thought her brother had packed her off to his Lancashire estates until she came round to a more suitable frame of mind about proposals.’
Lucian grunted. Some trailing edge of a thought wafted past. I poured more coffee and brooded and then realised what it was. My dream about stately homes the other night had been my subconscious at work.
‘You all have country houses, don’t you? Aristocrats, I mean.’ He nodded, looking rather as if I had asked whether all aristocrats had heads. ‘Where is yours?’
‘Suffolk. Clement’s is in Shropshire and Cottingham’s seat is in Lancashire. Welney…’ He frowned in thought. ‘Nottinghamshire. And Wraxall has a hunting lodge there too. Otherwise he uses his father’s various houses – not a good risk for hiding an abducted woman, if that is what you were wondering about.’
‘And de Forrest?’
Lucian put down his coffee cup with a rattle. ‘Middlesex. Damn it, I should have thought – but he never uses the place.’
‘Where in Middlesex?’
‘Brentford.’
‘But that’s – ’ I almost said London. ‘That is hardly any distance at all.’
‘Seven miles, at most,’ Lucian agreed. ‘A very easy drive out of Town.’
‘Then why does he keep a set of rooms in London and not use his own home?’
‘Because the house is closed up under wraps because of his money problems. The farmland is leased, I imagine, but I seem to recall that the house itself is old. It was in poor repair when he inherited it, along with considerable debts, so it is probably difficult to rent out.’