“I thought we were forbidden from speaking his name,” Portia said, handing me a cup of tea. The porters brewed up quantities of rank, black tea in tremendous cans every time we stopped. After three days of the stuff, I had almost grown to like it.
I took a sip, pulling a face at my sister. “Of course not. It is the merest disagreement. As soon as he joins us from Calcutta, the entire matter will be resolved,” I said, with a great deal more conviction than I felt.
The truth was my honeymoon had ended rather abruptly when my brother and sister arrived upon the doorstep of Shepheard’s Hotel the first week of February. The end of the archaeological season was drawing near, and Brisbane and I had thoroughly enjoyed several dinners with the various expeditions as they passed through Cairo to and from the excavations at Luxor. Brisbane had been to Egypt before, and our most recent foray into detection had left me with a fascination for the place. It had been the last stop on our extended tour of the Mediterranean and therefore had been touched with a sort of melancholy sweetness. We would be returning to England shortly, and I knew we would never again share the sort of intimacy our wedding trip had provided. Brisbane’s practice as a private enquiry agent and my extensive and demanding family would see to that.
But even as we were passing those last bittersweet days in Egypt, I was aware of a new restlessness in my husband, and—if I were honest—in myself. Eight months of travel with only each other, my maid, Morag, and occasional appearances from his valet, Monk, had left us craving diversion. We were neither of us willing to speak of it, but it hovered in the air between us. I saw his hands tighten upon the newspaper throughout the autumn as the killer known as Jack the Ripper terrorised the East End, coming perilously close to my beloved Aunt Hermia’s refuge for reformed prostitutes. I suspected Brisbane would have liked to have turned his hand to the case, but he never said, and I did not ask. Instead we moved on to Turkey to explore the ruins of Troy, and eventually the Whitechapel murders ceased. Brisbane seemed content to make a study of the local fauna whilst I made feeble attempts at watercolours, but more than once I found him deftly unpicking a lock with the slender rods he still carried upon his person at all times. I knew he was keeping his hand in, and I knew also from the occasional murmurs in his sleep that he was not entirely happy with married life.
I did not personally displease him, he made that perfectly apparent through regular and enthusiastic demonstrations of his affections. Rather too enthusiastic, as the proprietor of a hotel in Cyprus had commented huffily. But Brisbane was a man of action, forced to live upon his wits from a tender age, and domesticity was a difficult coat for him to wear.
Truth be told, the fit of it chafed me a bit as well. I was not the sort of wife to darn shirts or bake pies, and, indeed, he had made it quite clear that was not the sort of wife he wanted. But we had been partners in detection in three cases, and without the fillip of danger I found myself growing fretful. As delightful as it had been to have my husband to myself for the better part of a year, and as glorious as it had been to travel extensively, I longed for adventure, for challenge, for the sort of exploits we had enjoyed so thoroughly together in the past.
And just when I had made up my mind to address the issue, my sister and brother had arrived, throwing Shepheard’s into upheaval and demanding we accompany them to India.
To his credit, Brisbane did not even seem surprised to see them when they appeared in the dining room and settled themselves at our table without ceremony. I sighed and turned away from the view. A full moon hung over old Cairo, silvering the minarets that pierced the skyline and casting a gentle glow over the city. It was impossibly romantic—or it had been until Portia and Plum arrived.
“I see you are working on the fish course. No chance of soup then?” Portia asked, helping herself to a bread roll.
I resisted the urge to stab her hand with my fork. I looked to Brisbane, imperturbable and impeccable in his evening clothes of starkest black, and quickly looked away. Even after almost a year of marriage, a feeling of shyness sometimes took me by surprise when I looked at him unawares—a feyness, the Scots would call it, a sense that we had both of us tempted the fates with too much happiness together.
Brisbane summoned the waiter and ordered the full set menu for Portia and for Plum, who had thrown himself into a chair and adopted a scowl. I glanced about the dining room, not at all surprised to find our party had become the subject not just of surreptitious glances but of outright curiosity. We Marches tended to have that effect when we appeared en masse. No doubt some of the guests recognised us—Marches have never been shy of publicity and our eccentricities were well catalogued by both the press and society-watchers—but I suspected the rest were merely intrigued by my siblings’ sartorial elegance. Portia, a beautiful woman with excellent carriage, always dressed cap-apie in a single hue, and had elected to arrive wearing a striking shade of orange, while Plum, whose ensemble is never complete without some touch of purest whimsy, was sporting a waistcoat embroidered with poppies and a cap of violet velvet. My own scarlet evening gown, which had seemed so daring and elegant a moment before, now felt positively demure.
“Why are you here?” I asked the pair of them bluntly. Brisbane had settled back in his chair with the same expression of studied amusement he often wore when confronted with my family. He and Portia enjoyed an excellent relationship built upon genuine, if cautious, affection, but none of my brothers had especially warmed to my husband. Plum in particular could be quite nasty when provoked.
Portia put aside the menu she had been studying and fixed me with a serious look. “We are bound for India, and I want you to come with us, both of you,” she added, hastily collecting Brisbane with her glance.
“India! What on earth—” I broke off. “It’s Jane, isn’t it?” Portia’s former lover had abandoned her the previous spring after several years of comfortably settled domesticity. It had been a blow to Portia, not least because Jane had chosen to marry, explaining that she longed for children of her own and a more conventional life than the one they had led together in London. She had gone to India with her new husband, and we had heard nothing from her since. I had worried for Portia for months afterward. She had grown thinner, her lustrous complexion dimmed. Now she seemed almost brittle, her mannerisms darting and quick as a hummingbird’s.
“It is Jane,” she acknowledged. “I’ve had a letter. She is a widow.”
I took a sip of wine, surprised to find it tasted sour upon my tongue. “Poor Jane! She must be grieved to have lost her husband so quickly after their marriage.”
Portia said nothing for a moment, but bit at her lip. “She is in some sort of trouble,” Brisbane said quietly.
Portia threw him a startled glance. “Not really, unless you consider impending motherhood to be trouble. She is expecting a child, and rather soon, as it happens. She has not had an easy time of it. She is lonely and she has asked me to come.”
Brisbane’s black eyes sharpened. “Is that all?”
The waiter interrupted, bringing soup for Portia and Plum and refilling wineglasses. We waited until he had bustled off to resume our discussion.
“There might be a bit of difficulty with his family,” Portia replied, her jaw set. I knew that look well. It was the one she always wore when she tilted at windmills. Portia had a very old-fashioned and determined sense of justice. If she were a man, one would have called it chivalry.
“If the estate is entailed in the conventional manner, her expectations would upset the inheritance,” Brisbane guessed. “If she produces a girl, the estate would go to her husband’s nearest male relation, but if she bears a son, the child would inherit and until he is old enough to take control, Jane is queen of the castle.”
“That is it precisely,” Portia averred. Her face took on a mulish cast. “Bloody nonsense. A girl could manage that tea plantation as well as any boy. One only has to look at how well Julia and I have managed the estates we inherited from our husbands to see it.”
I bristled. I did not like to be reminded of my first husband. His death had left me with quite a generous financial settlement and had been the cause