A Gentleman of Unreliable Honor (Lord Julian Mysteries #6)

Chapter 5

Chapter Five

“I’ve always liked Lady Barrington,” Arthur said when I joined him in the earl’s study. “She was between husbands when I was making the rounds, and she seemed to appreciate a bachelor with no designs on her portion or her person.”

His Grace of Waltham pretended to examine the signature on a formal portrait of her ladyship, holding pride of place over the mantel. This display of idle curiosity confirmed that Arthur had a difficult topic to broach.

My handsome, shrewd, vastly accomplished brother was shy, a realization that had come as a shock to me when I’d resumed biding at Caldicott Hall. Growing up, I’d thought Arthur a prig, a dukeling, a firstborn aristocratic male, and, honestly, a bit stuffy. The six-year difference in our ages had added to my misperceptions. His Grace was simply very reserved, and for reasons.

His lofty station invited constant scrutiny, and his personal devotion to the estimable Osgood Banter could see him hanged, be he peer or peasant. I’d suggested strongly that Arthur and Banter enjoy a leisurely progress on the Continent, now that Europe was at peace. Arthur had nigh leaped on the opportunity, and their departure was days away.

Me and my brilliant suggestions…

“How are you getting on?” he asked when Lady Barrington’s portrait had been duly inspected. “Has Mama found her letters?”

She was Mama to him, at least in a private family conversation. “They were stolen, I’m afraid, and by somebody who could watch her comings and goings closely, somebody who knew the house party schedule to the quarter hour.”

Arthur wandered to the French doors and admired the view of the park. “A guest?”

“Possibly, or somebody in the pay of a guest. Tweed House staff would be unlikely to risk the good name of the family by stealing from a visiting duchess. Sufficient coin would nonetheless turn most of us into thieves under the right circumstances. What brings you here?”

Arthur and I had begun negotiating the delicate business of parting in preparation for his travels. We’d both felt Harry’s loss keenly in different ways, and we were much closer than we’d been when I’d returned from Waterloo.

Closeness came at a cost when separation loomed. I was preparing to hold the dukedom’s reins in Arthur’s absence and to endure the Hall on my own until he returned. For his part, Arthur was doubtless wrestling with the guilt of abandoning his post to his only surviving brother, and neither of our struggles were abetted by this unscheduled interview.

“I’ve had a letter,” Arthur said, withdrawing a folded piece of paper from a breast pocket. “I thought you should see it before any action is taken.”

“We are in the season of epistolary troubles, it seems.” I took the missive from him and brought it to the window. The hand was tidy, feminine, and confident. A lady’s hand.

“From Millicent,” I noted, mother to our nephew Leander. She’d taken herself off to her home shire, claiming a need to catch up with family and old friends, and we’d lent her the traveling coach to make the journey. According to John Coachman’s report, the reunion had gone well, her family seemed to be thriving, and the immediate parish prospered as well.

“She gets to the point near the end.”

After prosing on about the delights of family ties and the pleasure of seeing dear friends, Millicent did indeed get to the point: She wasn’t coming back to the Hall. After much thought, she’d decided that Leander’s lot in life would be easier were he committed to the care and custody of his ducal relations, and while it broke her heart to do so, she would start anew without him and maintain the maternal tie only to the extent she could do so discreetly.

Any documents necessary to put the situation on proper legal footing would be executed at His Grace’s request.

“She’s not wrong,” Arthur said. “We’ll do right by the boy. Harry was wrong for not marrying her. Leander is our responsibility now.”

“You’d rather she leave Leander behind than take him from us,” I said, “but that’s your conscience talking, not your heart. He’s a little boy, Arthur, and his mother has been his only stability. What you and I know about raising small children wouldn’t fill a stirrup cup. Leander will be devastated.”

“He might also be relieved.” Arthur joined me at the window, and there we stood, six inches apart, our gazes fixed on the landscape. “When I learned I was to be sent off to public school, I was about six, and somebody let it slip that six-year-olds were old enough to matriculate. Papa wouldn’t hear of it, of course, so I had a reprieve until I heard that some other fellow had been packed off at age eight. My next tutor was contracted for two years of instruction—another reprieve—and by the time I finally did leave the Hall at twelve, I wasn’t looking forward to public school, but I was ready to get on with it.”

For four years , the young ducal heir had dreaded that day of parting, and nobody had bothered to explain the situation to him. He hadn’t brought his worry to the attention of an adult who could have offered credible reassurances either.

“I was six when you left, and I thought you were never coming home.” Arthur’s letters to Papa had been weekly exercises in penmanship reporting high marks, perfect deportment, and bad, scanty rations. They were read at the supper table as a form of entertainment for the adults, but I’d heard them more as reports from an unpleasant and bewildering form of banishment.

“I am coming home, Jules.” Arthur spoke gently. “The Almighty alone can alter that aspect of my itinerary.”

The Almighty was notorious for altering itineraries. “Leander saw his mama off with every confidence she’d come back to us too. Lady Ophelia predicted this development, and she will not be best pleased with us for letting it happen.”

“I’ve wondered if I didn’t invite it to happen,” Arthur murmured. “I settled a sum on Millicent, and thus she became more marriageable.”

“I told you to settle that sum on her, more or less. I can fetch her home.”

“You cannot.”

How innocent my brother was. “If I roll up to her family home in all my Caldicott glory and indicate that she can either return to the Hall with me and resume her duties as the duchess’s companion, or hear me lay her past before the whole village, she will get into the coach.”

“You can take the soldier out of his uniform…” Arthur said, pushing away from the window and settling into the chair behind the earl’s desk. “You are not to waylay Millicent in such a fashion. I can postpone my departure, and we’ll see what’s to be done.”

The offer tempted me nigh unbearably. “You will do no such thing.” Arthur had worn the shackles of duty his whole life, while Harry and I had been in uniform for a mere handful of years. We had both freely chosen to buy our commissions and been suited to our roles, for the most part.

“I am Leander’s uncle, Jules, and—”

“I am his uncle as well. When it comes to the uncle business, we are equally unqualified to raise the boy and both positioned to adequately provide for him. The longer you put off traveling, the harder parting from Leander will become for you and for him. You are leaving, and that is a direct order.”

“You’re sure?”

He would ask that. “Of course not, but bumbling about, waiting for another letter to bring us another turn of events, or for Leander to start asking awkward questions to which we haven’t formed plausible answers, won’t serve. Millicent has made her decision. I will secure guardianship of Leander in your absence, and we will muddle on through the winter as best we can.”

What would Hyperia make of this development? Leander liked her tremendously, though Lady Ophelia was his odds-on favorite. She’d been mine, too, in early boyhood.

“I don’t like leaving this on your plate,” Arthur said, rising. “I am the duke, and the child is my responsibility, and you have enough to worry about.”

An oblique reference to my various infirmities of body and mind, perhaps. “Her Grace’s letters are likely in the hands of a blackmailer. When demands for money start appearing, I will have a trail to follow, and I can put her malefactor to rights then.”

“Speaking of which, keep that letter,” Arthur said. “If Millicent turns up hesitant when it’s time to sign legal papers, that letter confirms her consent to give us guardianship.”

Perhaps His Grace wasn’t so innocent after all. “I will put this epistle where even blackmailers won’t find it.”

“You’re sure the letters were stolen?”

“As sure as I am of anything, and so is Her Grace. She would not have summoned me otherwise.”

Arthur moved the standish two inches left so it was centered above Lord Barrington’s desk blotter. “What if the objective isn’t blackmail, but rather, torment? When I have had occasion to suspect that somebody noted my fondness for Banter, the result was torment. A blackmailer is a parasite. They seek coin, influence, some form of barter in exchange for silence, and I have vast resources with which to barter. Exposing my weaknesses to all of society would cut the blackmailer off from the steady flow of my wealth. My worst fear has never been blackmail per se, but rather, being in the power of somebody who could hurt Banter.”

“The duchess cannot be hanged for what’s in those letters, Arthur. She became entangled with a handsome young bounder. The tale is more sad than salacious.”

“But somebody has risked hanging by stealing them.”

“The risk arises only if I can catch the thief, as has been pointed out to me, and I have no confidence whatsoever that I can pull off such a miracle. Anybody Her Grace offended has a reason to purloin her private correspondence. Any guest or employee of a guest had some opportunity to commit the thievery. I have dozens of suspects, Arthur, and no means of narrowing the field.”

“So you’re in winter quarters, waiting for the enemy to move?”

Winter quarters had been more a matter of waiting for the spring rains to result in enough fodder that an army of tens of thousands could graze and provision its way across Spain.

“I am preparing to search the entire guest wing, more or less, but I must secure Lady Barrington’s permission first.”

“And Her Grace’s. Keep her informed, Jules. Mama asks little enough of me besides a weekly report of the goings-on at the Hall, but she does like to know what’s afoot. Have you inquired about her plans for the winter?”

“I assumed she did as she pleased.”

“Everybody assumes a duchess does as she pleases. The same mistake is made regarding dukes. You ask her as a courtesy. You tell her of your own plans on the same basis. She answers as a courtesy, and in the course of the discussion, it might be revealed that you’d enjoy spending the holidays with our mother, et cetera.”

I would enjoy spending the holidays with Hyperia, of that I was certain. “Her Grace would enjoy having her letters back.” For all sorts of reasons, I’d like to be the one to return them to her.

“Retrieving missing articles is your lookout,” Arthur said. “Banter wants us in Dover by Monday. We sail on Tuesday, God willing.”

That soon? “Then I hope your packing is well advanced. I’ll meet you in Dover.”

“Offer to bring Her Grace along. She won’t come—Mama has already delivered her parting lectures—but offer anyway.”

“If she’ll refuse the invitation, why bother to extend it?”

Arthur studied me for an uncomfortable moment. “Papa was no great prize as a husband, Jules. By the time you came along, the great marital rows had mostly ceased, and I no longer had to fear I’d walk into a room and find Mama in tears again, but His Grace had much to apologize for.”

Arthur, as the firstborn, had a perspective I lacked. “Did he apologize?”

“Oh, he doubtless regularly said the words, then broke her heart all over again. If there’s one thing I appreciate about Banter, it’s that he doesn’t play games based in jealousy and manipulation.”

He didn’t need to. Arthur’s devotion had been as unswerving as it was discreet, but that Arthur would verbally acknowledge Banter’s role in his life, even to me, was touching.

Also dangerous. “I will miss you.” I said the words before gentlemanly decorum, embarrassment, or pride could stifle them.

“I leave part of my heart at the Hall, Jules, just as you did when you went off to Spain.”

I absolutely had, much to my surprise, and memories of the Hall and its rural splendors had sustained me through some of my blackest moments.

“I’ll see you in Dover,” I said, tucking Millicent’s letter into my breast pocket. “How do you plan to get out of Tweed House without being seen? The unmarried young ladies are present at battalion strength, from what I saw at supper and breakfast, and the matchmakers will be in alt if they catch sight of you.”

Arthur returned to the French doors. “The matchmakers are in alt at the sight of you , Jules. Perhaps those blue spectacles obscure what’s sitting plainly in front of you.”

He undid the door latch, poked his head out, and glanced around the terrace. “The pre-lunch lull. I’m off.”

“Before you go, tell me this: Does Her Grace keep copybooks from years past?”

“I don’t know. You should ask her. I’ll have a look about the Hall, but I am not reading my mother’s mail, not even if she asks me to.”

“Away with you, then,” I said. “Take your time. Stroll along as if you merely want a word with your groom, or need to walk off a case of the wind before taking a meal in company. Don’t hurry, don’t dawdle. Give yourself a real objective—looking in on Atlas before you go—and ignore anything and anybody besides that goal.”

Arthur was reserved even in his facial expressions. His displeasure came through in a mere firming of the ducal lips.

“All of life is not skulking about under Wellington’s orders, Jules.”

With that, he was gone, and I went in search of Her Grace, by way of a casual, if thorough, inspection of the guest wing.

“Any sign of the gloves?” I asked as Lady Ophelia, Hyperia, and I settled at a table along the balustrade. Guests were gathering on the back terrace before the evening meal, and our social obligation was to mingle and exchange pleasantries.

Since my interview with Arthur earlier in the day, my capacity for pleasantries had taken French leave. How dare Millicent abandon her son? And yet, the world being what it was, her decision made practical sense for all concerned.

“We weren’t likely to find a missing pair of men’s gloves among a woman’s effects,” Lady Ophelia replied.

I held her chair and then Hyperia’s before taking my own seat facing the terrace and house. “Lady Barrington described them as old and worn,” I said. “If a woman sought to pick some roses, she might appropriate them.”

When I’d approached Lady Barrington about searching the guest wing, I’d told her we were looking for Her Grace’s missing letters. I doubted a thief would be foolish enough to leave purloined correspondence in plain sight, but clues to the thief’s identity were a different matter.

Lady Barrington had asked me to keep an eye out for a pair of men’s gloves that had belonged to her first husband. She’d kept them for sentimental reasons and occasionally wore them when gardening.

An odd item to misplace, distinguished only by the monogram H-G-M branded inside the cuffs. I had examined the guest list for parties whose family name began with a G, to no avail.

“You told us to look for what wasn’t in keeping with the whole,” Hyperia said. “Inconsistencies, jarring notes. I did not see Lady Barrington’s missing gloves, but I did learn that Lord Drayson likes to sketch young ladies without their clothes. He’s quite good at it.”

“His father had artistic talent,” Lady Ophelia said. “Not much call for that skill in the House of Lords.”

“Did you recognize the young ladies?” I asked.

“He’s more interested in bodies than faces, if that’s what you mean. He did one of me, but the features weren’t entirely accurate.”

“Not a blackmailer, then,” Lady Ophelia said. “My searches were similarly fruitless. Our Gideon is either using wood stains on his boots, or he’s taken to coloring his hair. Perhaps his parliamentary ambitions have turned him up more vain than usual.”

Our general strategy had been that I would search the men’s quarters, and Hyperia and Lady Ophelia would look over the ladies’ apartments. For Marchant, Lady Ophelia had pointed out that she was the least suspicious party to be found awaiting her fellow guest in his parlor. She’d known him for ages, got on with him well enough, and would have a better sense of what to expect among his effects.

“Wood stains? What did you find?” I asked.

“A tincture of black walnut,” Lady Ophelia said. “Covers up the gray, for a time, and doesn’t fade at the first hint of sunlight. One must be careful not to let it touch the face or hands, though. Stains those as well, and then everybody knows precisely how your youthful locks have defied the march of time.”

“I vaguely recall this,” I murmured. The housekeeper at my London residence had told me that I could recover some color in my shockingly pale hair by using water in which under-ripe walnut husks had been boiled. Marchant was either sparing with his applications, or his valet was very skilled, because his salt-and-pepper hue looked entirely natural to me.

“Lady Canderport tipples,” Hyperia said. “Brandy flasks under her pillow, in her spare reticule, in her workbasket. I’d tipple, too, if I had her offspring.”

Twins, male and female, at the dangerous age where they were well out of the schoolroom and eager to thwart any lingering vestiges of authority over them. They knew nothing of the world and thought themselves equal to any challenge.

“Charles is younger than Lottie by five minutes.” Lady Ophelia waved pleasantly to our host, who stood at the top of the terrace steps, looking jovial and benign. “Since Lottie learned to speak, every other sentence out of her mouth has begun, ‘If I had been born a boy.’”

“If she’d been born a boy,” Hyperia observed, “then Lord Drayson would not have sketched her in the altogether. One cannot object to a man indulging his private imagination, but those sketches were lying on the sofa in his sitting room.”

“Were they meant to be a distraction?” I asked. The punchbowl was in the opposite corner of the terrace, a gloved footman ladling out glasses of some pink concoction that likely included a quantity of cheap champagne. We English favored the drink more than the French did themselves, though I avoided it.

The younger guests were apparently enthralled with their fizzy potation, which boded ill for decorum at supper.

Hyperia adjusted the shawl about her shoulders, a forest green weave that went marvelously with her eyes.

“A distraction? You mean, I walk into the parlor looking for anything unusual, anything that doesn’t fit, and instead of seeing the dagger on the mantel, I’m fascinated with nude sketches?”

“Precisely.” An old and effective tactic among those with something to hide. A nude sketch, a nude woman… More effective at distracting the average male than money by far.

“I’ve seen nude sketches before, Jules.” Hyperia patted my hand. “Those drawings might have caught the attention of a young man simply idling about, but Lady Ophelia tells us artistic ability runs in the family. They fit with what we know of his lordship.”

Drayson was several years my junior, and he hadn’t served in uniform. To me, he was an unknown quantity and thus of interest.

“What else did you find?” I asked the ladies. The final supper bell could not ring soon enough for me. I had the beginnings of a headache, likely the result of a day of travel followed by a day of intrigue and frustration.

Who would comfort Leander when his little head hurt? Who would sing him lullabies when a vexing day left him too restless to find peace?

“I found that snooping holds no appeal for me,” Lady Ophelia said. “Peeking under the bed sounds naughty and wicked, and diverting in that regard, but…”

I had more or less snooped my way across Spain and had Wellington’s thanks to show for it. The average civilian, though, held my sort of snooping in contempt, as did I, on occasion.

“But then you learn things,” Hyperia said, gaze on the young people flirting by the punchbowl. “Things you have no business knowing, like Lady Canderport’s fondness for brandy. You cannot unknow that once you close the door to her apartment or make your report. You steal privacy even when you touch nothing and say nothing.”

“You might also prevent a blameless duchess from being blackmailed,” I pointed out. “You might find out who helped themselves to Lady Barrington’s old gloves. They mean a lot to her.” All she had to remember him by, according to her. She’d said that with such wistfulness too.

“Mrs. Whittington is bereft at the loss of her locket,” Lady Ophelia muttered. “Lord Barrington will soon pitch down those steps headfirst if he doesn’t cease swilling that punch. Hellie ought to know better.”

“Lord Barrington ought to know better,” I countered. He was amiable, hearty, and shrewd in my experience, too shrewd to be tipsy this early in the proceedings.

“Jules, perhaps you can distract him from the punchbowl,” Hyperia said. “We must consider our searching to have been in vain, I suppose. Interesting, but unproductive.”

“We can’t know that.” I rose and assisted Lady Ophelia to stand as well, though Hyperia eschewed my aid. “Reconnaissance requires patience. You sally forth and familiarize yourself with the terrain. Where will an army find grazing and water? Where could an ambush most effectively be laid? In the course of your wanderings, you see that a convent has been abandoned, and yet, the stable has recently been used.”

Then you wondered if the well yet offered fresh water and found that a cache of British guns had been secreted under the well covering. Guns for Bonapartists or for Spanish monarchists or for the bandits abroad in any country ravaged by warring armies? Who had secreted them there? Who was supposed to find them?

“Julian, pay your respects to Her Grace,” Lady Ophelia said briskly. “Dorothea will expect a report.”

My mother had joined the gathering, timing her entrance so as not to be late, but to make an impression on the full complement of guests. She wore emerald green and wore it well, with a shimmery peacock sort of silk wrap giving her added dash.

“Notice how little jewelry she wears,” Lady Ophelia said. “Dorothea has always had excellent taste. One envies her that. Greet her properly, young man, or I will tell Lady Jessamine that you are partial to silly blondes. Poor Hellie, being step-mama to such a vapid creature.”

“Lady Ophelia does not make idle threats,” Hyperia said, taking me by the elbow. “Let’s wish Her Grace good evening, shall we? You have enough to contend with, and Lady Jessamine is a tribulation in silk slippers.”

“Bless you, dear Perry.” We did the pretty before my mother, who was gracious conviviality itself. Even the young blades strutting before the punchbowl beauties were distracted. When Gideon Marchant brought Her Grace a glass of pink libation, I excused myself with a promise to find the duchess again before the whist tournament began later in the evening.

Would the supper gong never ring?

“You are always restless at the start of an investigation,” Hyperia said, “and then you get to haring about, too many questions, not enough answers, but you solve the riddles in the end, Jules, and Lady Ophelia and I are here to lend a hand. Now, tell me what’s really bothering you.”

I had promised that Hyperia would have a role in any inquiries that came my way if she pleased to assist me. I’d had occasion to try the alternative—keeping her at arm’s length in the name of gentlemanly discretion—and my discretion had nearly ended in disaster. She had a way of seeing connections I missed, and of seeing me .

“The missing letters bother me, locked guest rooms bother me, unlocked guest rooms bother me…” Lady Barrington had given out keys, but people weren’t using them. “Her ladyship knows something she isn’t saying, Perry. She locks doors in her own home, and yet, when others leave those same doors unlocked, she keeps mum.”

“What can she say? ‘I harbor thieves on my staff’? Thieves who will steal from a duchess? If Mrs. Whittington’s locket was taken, then somebody is also willing to take a widow’s memento and possibly our hostess’s sentimental token, assuming the gloves were taken as well.”

We descended into the garden and made for the outermost path around the parterres.

I rephrased Hyperia’s question. “What should Lady Barrington say? She should obliquely warn her guests to greater caution. She should remind them that house parties can bring together all sorts, that footmen temporarily hired from the Town agencies are sometimes not all that one would wish… If Mrs. Whittington’s locket and her ladyship’s old gloves were taken, our thief steals items of great sentimental significance. Spite rather than greed drives such behavior. You are keeping your door locked?”

“Of course,” Hyperia replied, “and I tie a long strand of hair around the latch, and so far, nobody has trespassed, but it’s only been a day.”

A long, frustrating day. “You ask what’s bothering me in addition to the thief du jour. Millicent wrote to Arthur. Says she’s not coming back to the Hall. She will continue to be a mother to Leander to the extent she can do so discreetly.”

A gust of laughter wafted from the terrace.

“Don’t hate her, Jules. Millicent kept him safe against all odds for five years. Kept him safe when his own father couldn’t.”

And damn Harry for that, but Harry was dead and beyond the reach of blame. “I don’t hate her, but I fear Leander might, and that she’ll break the boy’s heart, Perry.”

Hyperia squeezed closer, though to appearances we were merely having a decorous stroll in a garden growing chilly and shadowed.

“Hearts break, Jules, but we also know that hearts can mend and be stronger than ever.”

“Do we know that?”

“Yes. We are certain of it. We will convince Leander of this eternal verity as well, and he will not hate his mother. He will be properly angry with her, understandably so given his hurt feelings. But he will have us, and Millicent will remain a part of his life because you insist on it, and we will muddle on in good faith and in good heart.”

Wellington himself had never known the degree of resolution Hyperia West could put into a few soft words.

“I love you so very, very much.” I esteemed her, I needed her, and she was, thank all the benevolent powers, mine to love. “Let’s take a turn in the park, shall we?”

Hyperia looked to be considering the notion when a voice hissed out from behind the privet border.

“You can do your smoochin’ and sighin’ later, guv. I got a report to make.”

“Atticus, show yourself and make the fastest report of your young and storied life.”