Chapter 13 #2
Bryson considered my suggestion with a soldier’s dispassion toward preposterous orders. “I’ll be bait, then.”
“Interestingly enough, no harm has been directed toward you, unless the weakened ice was meant to crack beneath you. Miss West is the next logical target, followed by another prank involving my tiger.” A particularly vile sort of criminal might also harm my horse.
I’d asked for unrelenting vigilance from Ferguson of shut-yer-gob fame as a result.
“And you’d put the women and children in harm’s way? Doesn’t speak very well for your honor, Caldicott.”
“Miss West is not my subordinate to be told what to do or where to do it. She is an integral partner in my investigations, courageous, and insightful. You try telling her to muster out and see what sort of reaction you get. Then have a go at instructing my tiger on the necessity to exercise caution at all times. I’ll handle the bets. ”
“Like that, is it?” The question was wistful.
“Very much like that. Let’s consider tactics while we have the privacy to do so.”
Atlas walked along. Carstairs, to his credit, listened. He agreed only to consider my proposal to overstay our allotted leave and to revisit the suggestion after the banquet.
I left him in the Keep’s stable yard, where grooms were all scuttering about, bedding extra stalls, scrubbing extra buckets, and rolling barrels of ale into the saddle room.
The ballroom would be the scene of much gaiety in the coming hours, and the stable would be included in a modest version of the celebration. Lady Clotilda’s gracious touch again, though it occurred to me that she likely applied a lavish hand in part because she was spending the baron’s coin.
Tangled webs and utter foolishness.
Some guests would spend the night at the Keep.
Others would decamp under the conveniently full moon.
Moonset would happen by three a.m., thus most revelers would be on their way home well before the darkest hours.
An early night by London standards, but the height of protracted indulgence for the shires.
“I lack the stamina for these long evenings,” I said as I accompanied Hyperia up the narrow steps into the minstrels’ gallery. Unlike the guests coming from afar, we were permitted a view from the best vantage point. The luckiest children would enjoy peeking down from the gallery as well.
Only two of the chandeliers had been lit and hoisted aloft, and the very last of the evening sun provided the rest of the illumination. The melting beeswax candles and abundance of pine swagging gave off a fresh, sweet aroma, and the design on the floor was truly impressive.
Miss Quiggan had dusted the dance floor with white chalk and etched into her vast canvas the outline of the Dunsford coat of arms—lion rampant, three roses in the crest, a bendlet of gold (to use the heraldic term, a bendlet or) crossing the beast from the viewer’s upper left to the bottom right.
“The lion looks real,” Hyperia said. “Does the king of beasts imply some sort of royal connection for the Dunsford barons?”
“It might. The rules of heraldry seem to be observed in the breach more than elsewhere. I have not seen golden chalk used to this effect in any Mayfair ballroom.” Miss Quiggan had etched most of the design simply by clearing away the white chalk coating on the ballroom floor.
For the sash crossing the outlined shield, she’d somehow added a golden sparkle to the pattern—sand perhaps?
The roses above the shield had a pinkish tinge, which contrasted splendidly with the green swagging she’d created along the edges of the dance floor.
“Miss Quiggan has a gift,” Hyperia said. “This took thought, skill, and planning. If she wasn’t a lady born and bred, she’d be in demand for her talent chalking ballrooms.”
“This had to cost a packet.” I eyed the miles of pine roping, the yards and yards of ribbons circling the columns, the elaborate kissing boughs hung at strategic points on the ballroom perimeter. “Does Lady Clotilda hope to bankrupt her neighbor one ball at a time?”
“You are still considering motives and sinister deeds, Jules?”
The minstrels’ gallery, being elevated some distance from the floor below, was relatively warm.
The space would accommodate an octet at best. Because Lady Clotilda had recruited an orchestra of a dozen and a pianist, the musicians would be in the more spacious mezzanine at the top of the formal staircase.
“I am considering the whole mess.” I gestured to a bench and took the place beside my intended. “Despite a surfeit of eligible partis in this shire, nobody marries, Perry. Why is that?”
“Perhaps they aren’t attracted to one another?”
I took her hand, mostly out of habit, but also because I could reason more effectively when we touched.
“Two problems with that explanation,” I replied.
“First, the local standards for courtship don’t seem to require mad passion, but rather, tend toward the old-fashioned we-would-suit variety.
Bryson saw Peter walking out with Robin, and it occurred to Bryson that Wren wasn’t a bad sort, and she had that dowry, and why not… ? He wasn’t smitten.”
Though perhaps the lady had been smitten? Perhaps Bryson had been felled by Cupid’s arrow but wasn’t about to admit that now?
“True as far as we know. What’s your second objection?”
“When I do see an attraction in play—such as Algernon’s obvious fondness for Miss Quiggan—no action is taken.
Bryson’s overtures toward Wren were rebuffed by her family, and he simply shrugged and bought his colors.
No asking for a reconsideration or trying again when he came into a very attractive parcel of land.
Sandy Quiggan sits about waiting for his uncle to die when he might well pursue an heiress in Town.
Freddy Delaplane spends more time with the hounds than he does socializing with the ladies. ”
Hyperia rose and went to the balustrade. “Perhaps the gentlemen aren’t given any encouragement, Julian, and being gentlemen, they have no recourse but to wait for a more favorable day. You would let our engagement go on indefinitely, wouldn’t you?”
I joined her overlooking the lavish display in the darkening ballroom. “Not indefinitely, no. If I concluded that an engagement to me was making you miserable, I would insist that we part. I dearly hope we’d part friends, but I will not have your misery on my conscience, Perry.”
When I’d been able to put aside Bryson Carstairs’s troubles, I’d turned my thoughts to my own situation.
In one sense, all was a complete muddle.
Hyperia, whom I loved and respected, had not been honest with me.
Harry’s behavior fell so far below honorable minimums that he was lucky to be beyond the reach of my fists.
Arthur might never come home to the Hall. My mother was out of patience with me. My current investigation had resulted in serious peril for my tiger, and by logical inference, Hyperia was at risk of harm as well. I’d all but set an armed watch over my horse.
My life in some ways reminded me of a battlefield.
“What about the boot on the other foot, Jules? Do you think I want your misery on my conscience? I will not have us marrying because you feel obligated to keep a commitment.”
Hyperia’s appearance was composed, but I knew better. The slight tension in her words, the particular angle of her jaw, the militantly correct set of her shoulders… My dearest was bearing up under considerable emotional strain.
“A soldier,” I said, “makes an honorable commitment to the uniform, to the regiment, or to his sovereign. I understand those sorts of commitments quite well, Hyperia. My offer to marry you was made purely out of selfish motives. I can assure you of that.”
“I’m nobody, and my idiot brother thinks he’s somebody. Where is the selfishness in a ducal heir taking a nobody to wife?”
Firing her heavy artillery. “You have learned to impersonate nobody because that allowed you the most freedom from unwanted advances, unwanted attention, and unnecessary expenses. My sisters were all well dowered and well placed in Society. I know what they endured, and I see how adroitly you’ve maneuvered past those tribulations.
I offered for you because you chose the wise disguise, because even when you had no obligation to me, you set Godmama upon me and had me dragged to that rubbishing house party at Makepeace. ”
“Lady Ophelia was supposed to keep that part to herself. Now you will think me incapable of honesty.”
“You sought to spare my pride when you asked for her discretion. You knew the condition I was in and took matters in hand. My own family had no idea what was to be done with me, but you did. Why did you trouble yourself over my situation, Hyperia?”
Footmen carried in a glass punchbowl half the size of the Pool of London.
When that monstrosity had been placed in the exact center of a white-draped table, more footmen began unpacking boxes of glasses, wiping each vessel with a white cloth, and arranging them in concentric circles on more white-draped tables.
“I could not let you die,” Hyperia said. “I feared, based on what I’d heard from your mother and His Grace, that you might expire of shame. You’d somehow dragged yourself back into uniform for the Hundred Days, but there was all that business from before—when you were taken prisoner.”
She’d used the taboo word. We were in deep waters.
“You survived,” she went on. “Harry did not, and I feared that with your abundance of honor, logic, and dunderheadedness, you might convince yourself that Harry’s death was your fault. I could not let heedless, self-absorbed Harry be the death of a good man whom I had taken so for granted.”
I returned to the bench to sit because I could not trust my knees to hold me upright. “You took me for granted?”