Chapter 1 #3
“Dantry did not show up for breakfast on Wednesday?”
“Damned right he didn’t. I finished eating, waited, waited some more.
When the sun was well and truly up, I knocked on his door.
No answer. No Dantry. The bed had been slept in, his riding togs were gone, as was his greatcoat, top hat, gloves.
Could not locate his spurs—pretty little golden trinkets, they are—but his horse was in the stable. ”
“Did he take money, clothing, or jewels?”
“Take? We don’t know as he left of his own volition, my lord. You young people forget the days when press-gangs roamed the countryside and highwaymen lurked in hedges.”
The press-gangs had still been active when I had gathered my toys and skipped off to university. “Those days are fortunately behind us. Have you received a demand for ransom?”
“I have not.”
“Could you pay a substantial demand?”
He drank liberally from his second toddy. I was barely a quarter of the way through my first. Mrs. Gwinnett’s potions went down much too easily, and they packed the wallop of an annoyed artillery mule.
“Now that is a rude question, my lord. My finances. Astoundingly rude. As it happens, I am quite comfortable. No surviving sons to fritter away my wealth, blast the fates. Only Dulcie to dower, and she likely won’t marry.
Good land, good luck, good sensible wife when I had a wife.
I am no genius, nor do I work particularly hard.
I nonetheless would have had to be stone stupid and bone lazy not to end up well-heeled. These toddies are excellent.”
“Have a care, Sir Clive. They can sneak up on a man. What about Dantry? Could his financial situation inspire a kidnapping?”
“Have no clue. A gentleman doesn’t ask, and young men are so proud these days. If Dantry is struggling, I’m the last person he’d tell. Pride is the besetting sin of that side of the family. Titles, my lord.” He winked at me, the old scamp. “Titles are the very devil.”
“I want to help,” I said, which was not quite true. I wished I wanted to help. What I truly wanted was for spring to arrive, Hyperia to marry me, and wedded bliss to follow.
What I craved in the present moment, however, despite my own better judgment, was the dubious companionship of an unread book and a blazing fire in the solitary silence of my sitting room.
Wind gusted down the chimney and sent a shower of sparks toward my boots.
“Snow on the way,” Sir Clive said. “We’ve been spared thus far, except for a dusting here and there. The ground needs a good, deep snow, or spring will come on with the land too dry.”
I needed Sir Clive to take himself off before he was snoring on the carpet thanks to Mrs. Gwinnett’s potation.
“If Dantry does not wish to be found,” I said, “the archangels aided by the fairies would be unlikely to locate him. He has access to means, Sir Clive, and with a few coins, anybody can hop a stagecoach and be two counties away before nightfall.”
When I did allow myself to brood by the fire, I pondered the fact that from Surrey to Calais might take less than twenty-four hours, if the roads were clear and the winds and tides favorable. My French was excellent, Spanish even better. I had passable Italian and functional German.
And access to means.
“You don’t understand the larger situation, my lord.
” Sir Clive set aside his empty glass. “Dantry was a reformer.
He came into his honors only a few years ago and immediately set about disagreeing with every Tory in Parliament.
To hear Dantry tell it, war with France was merely an excuse for the peerage to further oppress the masses.
“According to Dantry,” Sir Clive went on, “England is suffocating with war debt, while polite society fiddles and charges interest, et cetera and so forth. The tariffs established by the Corn Laws are the devil’s handiwork, to quote him, despite the fact that they are all that keep the gentry solvent.
He would not miss a session of Parliament for love nor money. ”
The situation had abruptly become even more complicated. “Who benefits from silencing Dantry’s voice?”
Sir Clive’s expression sobered, and in that moment he looked not merely elderly, but ancient with the sort of indestructibility reserved for biblical patriarchs and Norse gods.
“I have no idea whose pet bill Dantry was determined to foil, or whose mines and mills he wants to shut down. But if you find that my cousin’s voice has been permanently silenced, you will please see to it that Dulcie comes into her inheritance without the solicitors fleecing her of every groat.
I lost my James to bad luck. I will be damned to an eternity in perdition if I will allow young Dantry’s murder to go unavenged. ”
Had I not heard this oath with my own ears, I would have thought Sir Clive incapable of such atavistic sentiments. The lex talionis had at least one vigorous advocate left in England.
“We have no reason to suspect murder,” I said.
“Young people, as you’ve reminded me, are often short on reason and long on passion.
I will call upon you at the Knot tomorrow, and if the weather allows, I will see what Sheldon has to say before he leaves for Town.
An earl is harder to hide than your average yeoman, and nothing indicates kidnapping or foul play. ”
Nothing thus far.
Sir Clive rose. “We’ll expect you at the Knot for luncheon on the morrow. The snow will hold off that long, and you should have time to get back to the Hall before the storm commences.”
I stood, too, carefully, given our choice of beverage. “How can you tell?”
“I served for five years in Canada, my lord. You would not believe the varieties of snow they have there and the science they make of learning its moods. While I was in uniform, I took a ball through the shoulder—healed cleanly, bless the resilience of youth—and the wound has gifted me with meteorological prescience. I can predict summer storms even more accurately. Comes in handy when you earn your coin farming.”
How had I not known that this genial old man was a former soldier with combat experience?
I saw him to the door and waited in the foyer until I spotted him trotting down the drive on his bony bay gelding. The pair of them did not look old. They looked intent on getting home in time for their nooning, which at the spanking pace they set, they’d achieve handily.
I was thumbing through Debrett’s—the Dantry earldom had originated in the seventeenth century under Charles II—when it occurred to me that the reason I knew nothing of Sir Clive’s military past was because he’d never spoken of it before.
He maundered on about breeds of sheep, jam recipes, his old auntie’s favorite hymns, and the best cure for thrush—about everything and anything—but he’d never once brought up his experiences in uniform.