Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
“Mark me on this,” Lady Clotilda said. “These frigid temperatures are all too common as the holidays end, and then the cold relents enough for the serious snows to begin. Dunsford will mope for weeks, and his hunters will finally have some rest.”
She sipped her mulled cider delicately, while my mother embroidered a floral border on a handkerchief in a wing chair by the fire.
Lady Clotilda believed in the old-fashioned comfort of a winter parlor, a smaller south-facing room that enjoyed excellent morning light and was easier to heat than its grander counterparts elsewhere in the house.
Why did all and sundry worship sunlight so slavishly? I was sufficiently overtaxed by the brightness that I was wearing my blue spectacles indoors.
“The baron appears to mope by default,” I said. “He is a dour soul, while Algernon seems to lack the capacity for seriousness.”
“Algernon is in the usual heir’s predicament,” Her Grace said, needle moving in a slow rhythm.
“Waiting for the titleholder to die and living on an allowance until that gloomy day. If we can attribute one fault to primogeniture, it’s the tension that must arise between father and son when a great inheritance lies between them. ”
“I can think of a few others.” Hyperia used a stick of cinnamon to stir her cider.
“That same inheritance can be lorded over younger siblings when the heir comes into it. Mere children are made to feel of unequal status as a result of something as arbitrary as birth order. Society looks at two brothers who might have been born four minutes apart differently, even though their appearance is identical, and the elder and younger have been switched in the nursery fourteen times since birth, all unbeknownst to them or their parents. The whole system is ridiculous.”
“My gracious,” Lady Clotilda said, “we are harboring a radical in our midst. How refreshing.”
Her ladyship was nearly as tall as my mother, though less robust. She was also flaxen-haired, while the duchess still had a lot of red in her locks.
Lady Clo had an aquiline nose that went well with her otherwise patrician features.
Earlier in life, she’d probably despaired of that nose, but in her present season, her proboscis added to her air of consequence.
That she and the duchess were great friends was somewhat puzzling.
But then, I could not read Lady Clotilda, could not tell her irony from her genuine humor or subtle ire. I often could not read my mother either, come to that, and I was hard put to discern even Hyperia’s current mood.
“What sort of rivalry exists between Algernon and Bryson?” I asked.
“I can answer that.” A young man sauntered into the room. “Auntie, Your Grace, Miss West. Good morning. You must be Lord Julian.” He bowed in my direction.
I rose. “Sir.” He bore a resemblance to Miss Quiggan about the eyes, and he lacked the height of the Carstairs menfolk.
He also had his sister’s auburn hair. His attire was fashionably rural, though his cravat pin looked to be a garnet or possibly a small ruby, an unusual choice for so early in the day.
“Lord Julian,” Lady Clotilda said, “may I make known to you my nephew Sandulf Quiggan. Sandy, Lord Julian Caldicott. You smelled the apple tarts.”
He grinned. “From two floors up and one wing over, as you knew I would. Is Amelia still cavorting with the houndsmen?”
“Or with a toddy or two at the hunt breakfast,” Lady Clo replied. “Don’t look so scandalized. Your sister is sensible, and the weather is bitter. His lordship was asking if there’s rivalry between Algernon and Bryson. Please do give us the benefit of your masculine perspective.”
“Interesting question. Miss West, might you pour me a spot of cider, please?”
The request was harmless, and Hyperia was sitting as close to the tray as Lady Clo, but I still did not care for the presumption. Lady Clo was the hostess, after all.
In my present mood, I would soon be as prickly as Lord Dunsford.
“If you want my honest opinion,” Sandulf began, “Michael played his older brothers against each other. He’d take Algernon’s horse without asking and intimate that Bryson had committed the felony.
He’d gripe to Bryson that Algernon wasn’t repaying a loan when, in fact, there had been no loan, and Bryson could not have compelled its repayment anyway.
So there’s Bry lending Michael some coin that will not, in fact, be repaid.
Michael was a different sort. A bit like the old baron—hard to fathom. ”
“I don’t think I would have liked him,” Hyperia said. “Manipulating his siblings, and for what purpose?”
“Entertainment,” Sandulf said. “Hampshire is not exactly a hotbed of culture and sophistication. Then too, boys of a certain age are mysteries even to themselves. Would you agree, my lord?”
“I would, and it’s about the same age at which those same boys become fascinated with the mysteries of the female gender. Befuddlement on every hand.”
Her Grace peered at me over her embroidery hoop. “Bryson and Algernon are well past the spotty, bumbling phase, and Michael is dead.”
“How did he die?” I knew, or was fairly certain I did.
“Fell off his damned horse.” Sandulf’s air of casual good cheer faltered.
“Sorry, ladies. I was up at Oxford visiting some chums on the sad day in question. Should not have happened, but Michael wasn’t one to listen to guidance, and he could sit a horse like you would not believe.
The word was, he’d been ill, or was ill, or had been getting ill.
In any case, he fell off his horse. Might have got his innards pummeled, was put to bed, and did not rally. ”
Plausible, but puzzling. Winter was rife with sloppy footing, mud, loose horse shoes, all manner of hazards that even the most skilled equestrian could not outride. But truly skilled equestrians were respectful of those hazards and took precautions accordingly.
Then too, if Bryson’s mutterings over the decanter could be believed, Michael’s death was at least partly attributable to misplaced bravado on the patient’s part—bravado intended to emulate a soldier’s stoicism in the face of illness and hardship.
“You’re sure it wasn’t the illness that did him in?” I asked.
Sandulf turned a gaze on me that put me in mind of his sister. Astute, pragmatic, self-possessed.
“Why such curiosity about a family tragedy that’s years old, my lord?”
The best lies were mostly truth. “Because I surmise that Bryson remains at a distance from his kin in part because of a tangled past. He is clearly missed at the Keep and has his own property to come home to, but he tramps about the woods in Surrey as a gamekeeper—and a good one, for that matter. That puzzles me.”
“One has heard about you and your puzzles,” Sandulf said. “Details regarding your situation are sketchy, and that makes you yourself something of a puzzle too, my lord.”
“Be rude if you must, Sandy,” Lady Clotilda said, “but do not be tiresome. You are jealous because his lordship served with Bryson while poor health precluded you from the same honor. Thank the heavenly intercessors for the occasional pair of weak lungs, I say. It’s not as if you are awash in brothers or male cousins. ”
Mama attended her embroidery, Hyperia examined her cider, and I waited for whatever riposte Sandulf would make. Clearly, the Carstairs were not the only Hampshire family haunted by conflicts.
Weak lungs, though, had often been a euphemism for insufficient funds to buy an officer’s commission, or insufficient courage to pursue that honor when coin was abundant.
“Many were unable to serve who would have been a credit to the uniform,” I said when Sandulf declined to reply.
“That England still had a complement of sensible, honorable fellows on home shores was a comfort to us on the Peninsula. A home guard of sorts, serving without pay or recognition, waiting in reserve for whatever England’s fate might be. ”
Sandulf nodded stiffly. “Reading all the casualty lists, because somebody had to. Sorting the affairs of the departed who never intended to fall to French bullets. Dealing with the widows and orphans, of whom we have a tragic abundance, to say nothing of soldiers fit only for battle who now seek employment when there’s none to be had.
One can be honorable toward one’s country without donning a uniform. ”
An odd speech, though every word of it was true. “You grasp what many in Parliament do not, Quiggan. Perhaps you should stand for the hustings.”
Another silence.
“Before anybody ventures off on a discussion of politics,” Hyperia said, rising, “I feel a need to stretch my legs. Julian, I must show you the portrait gallery, and don’t worry, Lady Clo keeps the fires going in the public rooms over the holidays. We’ll be warm enough.”
“My regards to the ancestors,” Sandulf said. “I believe I’ll ring for some sustenance. Too late for breakfast, too early for nooning. All at sixes and sevens, and I know I will be scolded for attempting to subsist on apple tarts.”
He tugged the bell-pull, and Hyperia and I left the warmth of the winter parlor for the quiet chill of the corridor.
“Jules, what was all that about?”
“I don’t know. Sandulf’s explanation for Michael’s death varies from Bryson’s, which might have nothing to do with anything.”
“Or it might have everything to do with Bryson’s banishment.”
“Does Sandulf have weak lungs?”
Hyperia paused at the foot of a staircase. “Why does that matter?”
“He was larking around Oxford in the dead of winter when Michael sustained his fatal injury or contracted his fatal illness. Winter frolics are not typical of those with weak lungs. I take it he’s somebody’s heir?”
“His uncle’s, Lady Clo’s oldest brother. Earl of Sharry. Sandy is wintering away from London’s coal smoke and under the watchful eyes of his sister and aunt. He darts off to Town from time to time nonetheless. He’s pleasant enough company.”