Chapter 6 #2
He was also another heir waiting for his turn at familial wealth and a title, and he’d avoided answering my question about the relationship—the present relationship—between Bryson and Algernon.
Why not offer that opinion? Why direct the conversation to the past, to the brother no longer able to defend himself?
We ascended the steps and turned right down a corridor lit with sconces. The instant we were behind the closed doors of the gallery, Hyperia and I were embracing as if we’d not seen each other for years instead of days.
“What details do you have regarding Michael’s death?
” I asked as Bryson paged through a collection of Haydn piano sonatas.
We were in the music room, a chamber large enough to accommodate a pianoforte and a great harp, as well as a good dozen stringed instruments adorning the inside walls.
A sizable hearth on the outside wall gave off blessed heat, and in here, the family apparently preferred to burn peat.
“I know Michael’s death was avoidable,” Bryson replied, setting a bound volume of music on the pianoforte’s rack.
“He was heedless of his health, took sick, did not go to bed as he ought, and eventually succumbed to what at that point was lung fever. Pleurisy was no doubt in the picture as well by then, and maybe a putrid sore throat. Why?”
“Because I’ve heard a somewhat different account involving a fall from a horse.”
Bryson placed his hands on the keyboard. “Not possible. Michael was part horse himself. The proverbial centaur. As skilled on horseback as Peter, but more dashing. Truly, he should have been permitted to join the cavalry, my lord. Napoleon would have never tried the Hundred Days.”
Oh, right. And the stirring welcome Old Boney had received from the entire French army would not have signified at all.
“What were Michael’s faults?”
Bryson took up a lively allegro in G-major. “What has any of this to do with my present predicament?”
Haydn sonatas were generally not to my taste.
They had a cheerful, graceful predictability, like a lot of giggling schoolgirls, all pretty in the same way.
Major keys predominated, as did short, lively movements.
Most of the sonatas were inoffensive and forgettable, full of ornamentation and uniform phrasing.
“You believe,” I said, “that your depictions of military life somehow inspired Michael to be careless of his health. You wrote to him of short rations, dashing cavalry charges, forced marches through hellish weather, a lot of idealized claptrap that might have appealed to a callow youth.”
“Impressionable, not callow, and yes… Michael was trying to live up to the image of the military life I put into my letters, or he’d never have been so heedless of a winter illness.”
The opening theme recapitulated with more trills and turns and whatnot.
“How do you know that?” I touched the string of a guitar, an instrument frequently heard in Spain, less so in England.
“Michael was a faithful correspondent. He hoped when he finished his studies that the war was still raging so that he could join up, and bedamned to securing Papa’s blessing.
He was neither heir nor spare and thought it a great affront that he’d been herded off to university instead of being allowed to charge across the Peninsula. ”
So many boys who’d gone charging across the Peninsula had never returned. “Has anyone else read those letters?”
The same trite, sprightly theme now presented itself in a minor key.
“I shouldn’t think so. I do wonder at the direction of this interrogation, my lord.
I knew my younger brother well. You followed your elder sibling into battle.
Imagine how he’d feel if you had been denied that privilege and instead tried to emulate life on campaign with a series of avoidable risks. ”
I could not afford to be distracted by Harry’s ghost. “You’re rushing. Haydn doesn’t improve with excessive speed.”
Carstairs smiled and played a little faster. “What did you learn from Lady Clotilda?”
“Carstairs, heed me. Somebody has accused you of heinous behavior. The only remotely guilt-inducing behavior you’ve mentioned to me is this burden of responsibility you feel about your younger brother’s death.
If somebody else holds you responsible for Michael’s passing, that person might well be our culprit. ”
I preferred this theory, divorced from matrimony and settlements. Plain old vengeance was so much easier to understand than convoluted courting politics.
I’d come up with Michael’s death as the motivating factor for Bryson’s troubles while discussing particulars of Carstairs family history with Hyperia in Lady Clotilda’s portrait gallery.
My intended had grown predictably impatient at the mention of Bryson’s deceased brother, but had allowed that if Harry had somehow goaded me to my death, she would have been hard put to look upon him, much less socialize with him at the family seat.
A good theory was both entirely credible and a little too obvious once formulated.
Carstairs played to the next cadence and ceased. “You think it’s that simple? I am responsible for Michael’s death. Therefore, I am banished?”
“You hold yourself responsible for his death. I haven’t seen any evidence that anybody else does, but stranger motives have resulted in worse crimes.” I touched the guitar string again, and a single note sounded in a mellow tone.
Such a lovely instrument. The guitar never shouted, was never shrill or booming. I could play a little, but not with any competence.
“I hate to admit it,” Carstairs said, closing the volume of music, “but the simplicity of your logic is irrefutable. If I hold myself responsible, perhaps Papa does, or Algie, or the housekeeper, for that matter. She doted on Michael. The Delaplane siblings were endlessly fond of him, and even Quiggy and Sandy enjoyed his company. But who would know what Michael and I put into our letters, and who would blame me for painting an appealing picture of military life?”
Bryson blamed himself. If he’d told me that much, and when we’d been barely acquainted, he might have told any passing tinker the same.
“Perhaps we are looking for somebody who truly had a hand in his death and cannot admit that,” I said, thinking aloud. “In the alternative, we’re searching for somebody who held you in general dislike and was eager to blame you for bad harvests of any sort.”
Carstairs rose and pushed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “The peat smoke. I can handle coal smoke more easily, for some reason. Nobody would know of our letters…”
“Michael might have read your letters to his fellow students, all of whom would express a desire to be fighting rather than studying. He might have left drafts of his letters lying about for recopying or paid another boy to make the final copies. We don’t know.”
“You make quite a leap from ill-advised letters to vengeance, but the leap is rational.”
I took down the guitar, perched on a bench by the hearth, and began the tuning process.
“When it came to loading your conscience with guilt, you had more to go on than the letters. You knew your brother, you knew how much you misrepresented army life, you knew that you survived battle after battle while he merely went off to university and came down with a sniffle.” Or came down with the flu and went out riding anyway.
“You knew that you’d finagled your way into the Rifles from a cavalry post. Context compounded your remorse. ”
“Is this your only theory? That somebody else blames me for Michael’s death?”
“I would not even call it a theory, simply a logical extension of your own thinking, however farfetched. Another possibility is that you crowd the field of bachelors vying for a piece of the Delaplane fortune. Tell me about Sandulf Quiggan.”
A third possibility had emerged in my discussions with Hyperia, though I had not shared my conjectures with her. Too farfetched, too silly.
I moved along the strings, tuning them to one another, which had always made more sense to me than tuning an instrument to some arbitrary pitch.
Carstairs returned the volume of Haydn to a bookcase between two tall windows. “Sandy is heir to an earldom, which ought to put him at the head of any bachelor packs. Well ahead of me, in any case.”
“But?”
“But his uncle is in roaring good health, more than capable of taking on a young bride, and Sandy, other than being an all-around flirt, hasn’t shown any inclination to marry.
His mama left him adequately provided for, or that’s the impression Quiggy has imparted, whatever ‘adequate’ is for a Town bachelor these days. ”
“Or has Sandy been a diffident suitor because the Delaplanes are too busy courting a Carstairs?”
Bryson turned his back to the bookcase and studied me with a less-than-friendly eye.
“I like Sandy Quiggan. Everybody does. We like Quiggy—Amelia—as well and get on with most of our neighbors, with the exception of Lady Clo. Why aren’t you considering her as the author of my misfortunes?
She’d make me miserable just to twit Papa. ”
Precisely the line of reasoning I’d revisited in the gallery. Her Grace’s suggestion, and one I’d initially dismissed.
I began to pick out a simple lullaby I’d learned in Spain.
“Her ladyship has done nothing to interfere with the friendships among the junior ranks. She has also been welcoming to me, a guest at the Keep. Her animosity seems to be reserved for the baron, who tries to incessantly pester some acres away from her estate.”
“Not just some acres, my lord, her little forest, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Her home wood is a proper stand of trees, many quite venerable. Her forest is like the old royal forests, a wilderness left to its own devices. Some of the ground is boggy, some aspires to woodland status, most is simply a scraggy tangle, but she just lets it all… be. That drives Papa nigh to Bedlam. He’d have those acres cleared in a single season and producing the year after that. So would most responsible landowners.”
A forest primeval, of which there was less and less in England.
“But where does the argument begin?” I asked, starting again on my little melody and adding some simple harmony.
“Does she keep those acres in their native state to annoy the baron, or does the baron carp on their acquisition to irritate her ladyship? What is their feud actually about?”
And was it so bitter a conflict that her ladyship would take up epistolary arms against Dunsford’s spare—the son he appeared to respect?
We were developing theories, suspects, and possible motives, but nothing that struck me as an authentic explanation for Carstairs’s exile. That frustrating sense of inadequacy was a common vexation early in an investigation, but I had only four more days to sort through all the possibilities.
“I have been invited for tea at Lady Clotilda’s,” I said. “I will put the question to her directly. When the topic of your unwillingness to return home came up this morning, she offered no comment one way or another.”
Carstairs started across the room. “Exactly how you’d expect my detractor to behave, and as to that, threatening letters and anonymity strike me as feminine tactics. If the poison pen belongs to Lady Clo, nobody will be surprised.”
I would be. She struck me as one who’d observe the Law of Innocents, an ancient churchly doctrine of Celtic provenance that insisted war should be waged by the parties who were aggrieved with one another—the knights and earls and kings—without dragging the peasantry, women, and children into the affray.
In my experience, the Lex Innocentium had been all too often honored in the breach, though Lady Clo apparently reserved her ire for the baron himself.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Carstairs said. “Algernon has invited me to a game of backgammon, which has become something of a tradition. Losing the opening game is his way of welcoming me home. We could play billiards instead if you’d like to join us. Algie seldom loses at billiards.”
“I will pass. I’d like a word with your father.”
“Good luck. Papa is always in a sour mood when the fox gets the better of him. A particularly sour mood. If he sends you packing, find us in the game room.”
I did not, in fact, want to have a word with Dunsford.
He was poor company, a grudging host, and, from what I could see, not much of a father.
If he sought to inspire his heir to the altar, though, he might relegate his spare to the existence of a lowly gamekeeper—a fellow unlikely to take a wife—and be underhanded in his methods.
That line of thinking constituted a fourth theory that also struck me as outlandish, though chasing a skinny fox across frozen terrain qualified as an outlandish definition of sport.
Then too, the Dunsford estate was vast and impressive, but the Dunsford family tree was apparently down to two bachelor twigs dangling from one aging bough on the direct line.
As easily annoyed as Dunsford was, that state of affairs had to be eating at him.