Lord Foxbridge Butts In Read online

  Lord Foxbridge

  Butts In

  Robert Manners

  Contents

  Foreword

  Prologue

  The Mystery of the Prancing Pole

  The Adventure of the Walls That Talked

  The Affair of the Diplomat’s Darling

  The Episode of the Monstrous Marquis

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Foreword

  There are several places in these stories where amounts of money are mentioned; British money before the Decimalisation of 1971 could be a bit confusing, and the value of monetary units were quite different from today.

  The basic rule of thumb is that a 1927 pound sterling was worth about $80. A pound was made up of twenty shillings (1s = $4), and a shilling was made of twelve pence (1d = 33¢). A ‘sovereign’ is slang for a pound coin, while a ‘quid’ is a pound note (paper money).

  For the obsolete denominations: a guinea was worth a pound plus a shilling ($84), and was used to price luxury goods, racing purses, and special commodities; a crown was five shillings ($20); a half-crown two shillings and sixpence ($10); and a florin was two shillings ($8).

  There are also places in these stories where real places and real people are mentioned; however, all of the events portrayed are completely fictional, and no disrespect is intended to any of the historical persons, businesses, or institutions depicted here.

  Prologue

  The Viscount Takes Rooms

  I suppose it all started — this amateur detective business, I mean — when in the summer of 1927 I decided to take rooms at Hyacinth House instead of the usual bachelor flat in Park Lane or Berkeley Square. There is something about living in an hotel that opens up innumerable opportunities to exercise my naturally inquisitive nature, opportunities that would never have opened if I’d followed others of my rank and pedigree into more conventional lodgings.

  But perhaps the inquisitive nature was the true start of the business: at home, I was always pestering the servants with questions, catching them out in petty lies and unraveling their belowstairs intrigues; at Eton I built quite a reputation for finding lost and stolen articles for my fellows (I had another reputation, as well, but more on that later); and at Oxford I nosed my way into the society of the local constabulary by helping solve one or two problems in the colleges that puzzled them, having first come to their notice over the affair of the Marchioness of Steyne’s missing tiara.

  But an hotel, with its ever-changing cast of characters coming and going all the time from all over the world — especially an hotel just off the busiest thoroughfare in the beating heart of a teeming metropolis — is a very different proposition from a country-house, a public school, and a university, all of which are essentially closed systems filled with familiar characters. Hyacinth House, from the first day I arrived, provided me no end of fascinating strangers.

  I ended up there after a week of writhing indecision on where I was to make my abode when I came down from Oxford. My father, the tenth Earl of Vere, had let the family showplace in Whitehall to one of the newest Balkan states for use as an embassy, and I did not fancy sitting out the Season at Foxbridge Castle under the eye of my Aunt Emily: I wanted to sow my oats, and you can’t do much of that sort of thing in the depths of Gloucestershire (unless, I suppose, you are an oat-farmer). And taking a flat required so much effort in the way of talking to estate agents and looking at rooms, trekking through shops for furniture and appointments, and lots of boring talk about leaseholds and rents and service fees.

  Money was not an issue, fortunately, as I had recently come into Uncle George’s pile, left to me instead of Pater purely for spite: I’d never actually met the man, he’d lived in Singapore since before I was born. The typical embarrassing scapegrace younger son sent East, he’d amassed over a million pounds in the tea and coffee trade (supplemented, no doubt, by opium and guns, which pay better) before dropping dead in a house of ill repute the previous Christmas. And then there was my late mother’s substantial private fortune, paired with her father’s lucrative patent-medicines empire, held in trust for me until I married — though I had enjoyment of the proceeds until that blessed (and I assumed remote) day. I was in the unique position of being a good deal wealthier than my own father, whose estates were ancient and vast but mostly consisting of ill-managed land.

  No, the issue was boring responsibilities, with which I would one day be saddled when Pater dropped off his perch and burdened me with the ermine and coronet, the houses and land, and the inevitable seat in the Lords. I was not going to take on responsibilities of any kind before that, if I could help it.

  So though an hotel was rather an unconventional residence for a peer’s son, learning of the existence of the Hyacinth presented the perfect solution to my problem: clean furnished rooms in a desirable location with all necessary service laid on, and a management that would not look askance at my friends. And so, while my new valet packed my things and closed up my rooms in Magdalen College, I phoned ahead to secure a bedroom and sitting room with bath en suite, hopped on the morning train, and rolled up in a taxicab to an imposing Georgian facade in St. James’s Street exactly halfway between White’s and Boodle’s — not the heart of Clubland, but certainly the oldest and finest leg of it.

  Once a nobleman’s mansion and then a gentlemen’s club, Hyacinth House had but recently been converted into a small private hotel that catered to men “of a certain stripe.” It was not a brothel by any means, though overnight visitors were not frowned on, and the staff were intensely discreet; it was something new in the world, an exclusive establishment for housing Confirmed Bachelors of Means whose amorous activities might cause raised eyebrows or worse in other, more conventional hotels.

  “Good morning, I’m Viscount Foxbridge,” I introduced myself to a spry, morning-coated gent standing behind a high mahogany desk, sporting an old-fashioned Cavalier mustache, flashing silver pince-nez, and a large white peony in his buttonhole; a small brass plaque on the desk informed me that I was addressing Mr. P. Delagardie, Manager, “I have a reservation, I believe?”

  “Ah, Lord Foxbridge, what a pleasure,” the man bowed grandly without taking his eyes off my face, “We have two very pleasant rooms for you, and a separate accommodation for your valet. Have you any luggage, my lord?”

  “My man is bringing it up by a later train,” I explained, leaning over to sign my name in the register. I noted that I was not the only titled creature in residence: there was a Dutch baron, a Polish count, and a French marquis further up the page, a couple of Honourables and a baronet, not to mention various military officers both foreign and domestic.

  “And for how long may we expect the honour of your lordship’s company?” the man asked with charming formality, coming out from behind his desk and gesturing toward an archway and a grand marble stair soaring up to a skylit gallery.

  “Indefinitely, I should think,” I replied, following him into the stair-hall and examining the paintings that lined the walls, almost all of which were chaste male nudes, mostly of the Victorian neoclassical school with a few Old Master copies thrown in, “assuming the accommodations are adequate.”

  “I am certain your lordship will be pleased,” the manager assured me, pausing halfway up the steps to point out the public rooms located on the ground and first floors, all of which retained the fusty but substantial tobacco-coloured aspect of a nineteenth-century gentlemen’s club, “Downstairs we have a library and two dining-rooms, public and private, as well as a winter-garden; on the first floor are the lounge, the card-room, and the billiard-room. Your lordship’s suite is on the second floor, separated from the main part of the building by a gallery, two rooms overlooking the cou
rtyard. Very quiet and very convenient. If you’ll step this way, my lord.”

  Preceding me down a windowed mezzanine at the half-landing of a second staircase (the back rooms were a bit lower than the corresponding floors in the main block), Mr. Delagardie stopped and produced a key with an immense silk tassel on it, unlocking a door marked with a brass number six. The door led through a tiny lobby into a large square chamber with a beautiful caramel-marble fireplace flanked by recessed book-cases, rich walnut paneling, and stylish new maplewood furnishings covered in buff leather and camel-hair. Beyond a pair of sliding doors was a cozy bedroom furnished in the same style and lined with built-in wardrobes, and beyond that was a modern bathroom done in gleaming chromium and eau-de-Nil tile.

  “I think this will do very nicely,” I admitted, peering through a tall window at the uninspiring view: three rows of windows across the courtyard, three rows in the gallery I’d just passed through on my left, a blank brick wall on my right, the domed glass winter-garden roof below, and a small square of gray London sky above.

  Sudden movement across the way caught my eye, however, and the view became rather more inspiring: a lithe young man clad only in his own skin executed a grand jeté in a room opposite, flashing across the window like a bird in flight; my curiosity sparking like a flint, I asked the manager, “Who is that in the room across the way?”

  “That is Count Gryzynsky, my lord,” the manager smiled knowingly, “He is a dancer, recently with the Ballets Russes, but now touring alone. A very agreeable young gentleman, for a foreigner.”

  “How interesting,” I said, making a note to explore that avenue of interest at a later date, and continued examining the sitting room, poking around in the bookshelves beside the fireplace, “What’s on the other side of this wall?”

  “That is the back wall of the house, my lord, there is nothing on the other side,” the man looked at me oddly.

  “But what building backs on to it?” I persisted.

  “I do not know, my lord,” the man admitted, but hastened to cover his ignorance, “That wall is quite thick, no noise penetrates at all.”

  “Good, good,” I mumbled; my curiosity momentarily thwarted, I turned my attention to the empty fireplace and peered up the flue, which appeared to be quite clean but did not rise straight to the sky, “I’ll let you know when I find out.”

  “Will there be anything else, my lord?” the manager started backing out of the room as if I were royalty — or a dangerous lunatic.

  “No, thank you. When my man turns up with the luggage, have him come to me directly. His name is Pond.”

  “Very good, my lord. Thank you, my lord,” Delagardie bowed again while completing his backward exodus, and pulled the door shut with a gentle click.

  After a thorough examination of the rooms, I found myself at a loose end. It was too early for luncheon, and certainly too early for a drink; and I couldn’t very well go out anywhere as I was, in the Norfolk suit and cloth cap I’d worn for the train — fine for the University, but too rustic for Town, besides being somewhat rumpled from travel; I had nothing else to wear until Pond brought the luggage, not even a bath-robe.

  With nothing better to do, I pulled a book off the shelves at random, fell into a comfortable armchair, and lit a cigarette, preparing for a long wait. The book was a collection of Restoration sermons, and I opened it at random to a surprisingly sprightly treatment on Saint Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. I was fully engrossed in the thing when Pond finally turned up.

  “I brought your toilet things first, my lord,” he gasped, veritably running through the room with a small case clutched to his chest, “I’ll draw the bath so your lordship can wash while I air and lay out our clothes.”

  Though Pond was new to my employ, I’d known him for ages, as he was a frequent visitor to a pub just outside of Oxford on the Banbury Road called the Lionheart, where men of our sort were wont to meet. He had been valet to a very grand baronet whose estate lay along the Cherwell, and had fortuitously got himself sacked for immoral conduct with an undergardener, just weeks before I would need a valet of my own at the end of term.

  He was young as valets go, perhaps ten years older than myself, small and dark and extremely neat, nice-looking but slightly ferret-faced. He was the perfect valet for me, experienced in the care and disposition of a gentleman’s wardrobe, and of the same inclinations as myself — but preferring a vastly different type. He had no desire towards gilded youths of my kind, being instead a devotee of “a bit of rough,” working-class men with burly shoulders and callused hands; I was more enamored of the hearty sportsmen of my own class, rowing and rugger men with the same big shoulders and callused hands, but with handsome faces and names in Debrett. We could be the best of friends with neither attraction nor competition coming between us.

  “The bath is ready, my lord,” Pond returned after a brief absence, “The rest of the luggage is coming up in the service lift. I will have our clothes laid out in time for luncheon.”

  “Thank you, Pond,” I said, passing him as he rushed back out. The bathroom was steamy and fragrant with my own special-blend bath salts, gorgeously scented with herbs and flowers by the ancient still-room maid at Foxbridge Castle. Sliding out of my travel-stained clothes and leaving them in an untidy pile by the door, I stepped over to the looking-glass to see if I needed to touch up my shave.

  I suppose now is a good time to tell you something about my appearance, rather than leaving you suspended with nothing but your own imagination to tell you what I saw in the glass.

  My face was extraordinarily pretty in those days, an exquisite oval with delicate features and a blooming skin, big round chestnut-colour eyes that made me look frightfully innocent, and a sensuous scarlet mouth that made me look anything but; my hair was a bit more red than brown, naturally curling but rigorously brushed down to a more dignified ripple; my figure was long and slender, perfect for the fashion of the day, but well-knit from cricket and tennis and riding to give my limbs that sculptural delineation so appreciated by the Greeks.

  I was widely considered the greatest beauty of my year at Eton, and was rated nearly as high at Oxford (though angelic prettiness is less valued at that age, when the criteria of masculine beauty shift from Ganymede to Adonis). But though I enjoyed my beauty, I didn’t put much stock in it: being pretty, rather than handsome, is a short-lived distinction — my father had been a beauty in youth, too, like one of those pretty little Dresden figurines that old ladies collect; but by the time he was forty, he was a pinch-faced grotesque with a bulging forehead and a scrawny neck.

  I never pretended that the favourable attention my looks brought me was mine for life, and certainly not due to the value of my character; and that I would certainly have to develop a character before the bloom was off the rose, if I wanted to remain lovable. I had to hope that the well-stocked catalogue of amorous exploits I intended to collect while I was still pretty would be sufficiently character-building.

  And of course I did not need a shave. It still took me a week to grow enough whisker for the barber to see, much less shave. I was very impatient with this recalcitrance on the part of my beard, as it made me look years younger than I really was. People sometimes even addressed me as “sonny,” perhaps the most galling thing a twenty-one-year-old Oxford graduate can be called.

  When I emerged from the bath, scrubbing my head with a towel as I came, I nearly collided with Pond standing in the middle of the room with my underclothes held out like a sacred offering. I was still new to the business of being valeted — at home, there’d been a footman who laid out my evening clothes and helped me do my ties, and the fagging system at school taught me both sides of dressing a gentleman; but I’d been managing on my own for the last three years, and having a whole person in my life whose sole and sacred responsibility was to dress me took some adjustment. At any rate, finding a man in one’s bedroom holding one’s knickers can be something of a jar if you’re not used to it.

>   “You can lay those down, Pond,” I said when I recovered myself, draping the towel around my waist (it felt unexpectedly awkward to be naked in front of a man in a black suit), “I’m not quite dry yet.”

  “Very good, my lord,” he replied, laying the garments reverently on the bed. This gentleman’s-gentleman Pond was so at odds with the raunchy and colorful Reggie I knew from the Lionheart pub; having known him first socially made it slightly difficult to see him professionally. I wanted to elbow him in the ribs and tell him to ‘come off it, love.’

  But if Reggie Pond felt in any way awkward about this change in our relationship, handling my drawers and addressing me as ‘my lord’ instead of ‘Foxy’ (my school nickname, I’m afraid; and though not in any way imaginative, with my red-brown hair and my title, it seems to have permanently stuck), it did not show in his impassive face and far-away eyes.

  In a very few moments, and with very little assistance from me, I was attired in my best slate-gray suit with a mauve silk tie and matching handkerchief in my top pocket (a coded signal in those days), gray kid spats on my feet and gray kid gloves in my hand; I thought myself quite the snappy dresser — not quite so snappy as to appear effete, nor so careful of my appearance that I would be considered vain, but I definitely qualified as a dandy. With plenty of money to throw around at my tailor’s and haberdasher’s, an excellent eye for detail, and a good valet, I would make quite a sartorial splash in London that Season.

  I thought of lunching at the Hyacinth, and even stopped and examined the menu as I passed the public dining room, but I really wanted to have my first lunch as a full-time Londoner at Brooks’s, just across the street, where my father put me up for membership the year before — not from the kindness of his heart, of course, but because the Earls of Vere had always belonged to Brooks’s, ever since its founding. Fortunately, Pater did not expect me to lunch with him; he in fact was seldom seen at Brooks’s during the Season, much preferring to lunch at Westminster and dine at St. Stephen’s when Parliament was sitting.