Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Earlier in my engagement to Hyperia, I’d assumed my letters to her ought to be miniature literary gems, full of wit and exquisite turns of phrase.
Having no facility with either, I’d written little.
Hyperia had thus had only a few, short missives to reply to, and our epistolary exchanges had left us both unsatisfied.
They had also left me with a nagging unease. Why had I nothing to say to the woman I esteemed beyond all others?
I had recently lit upon the theory that I had enough to say, I simply lacked practice saying it with my pen.
I was still in the grip of an intelligence officer’s mentality: Dispatches in the wrong hands could cost lives.
Reports overheard by the wrong ears could lose battles.
Keep carefully to the essentials for the safety of all concerned.
Marriage was not a military campaign. I dipped my quill in the inkpot and rummaged around for what news Hyperia might find interesting.
Dearest Perry,
A mystery has presented itself from an unexpected quarter: How can Sir Clive Arbuthnot, a venerable fellow and neighbor, down two servings of Mrs. Gwinnett’s best toddy and still remain upright, steady, and articulate, when one toddy nearly lays me out?
That question arose in the midst of a call Sir Clive paid regarding another puzzling matter.
Sir Clive’s younger cousin, Lord Dantry, has disappeared from a guest room at the Knot, and my knightly neighbor has enlisted my aid locating the earl.
To say I am reluctant to embark on a lot of haring about in the dead of winter is an understatement…
I was more than reluctant to convey to Hyperia the weight of lassitude and despondence threatening my spirit.
I might endure a passing megrim or temporary low spirits.
The more accurate label—melancholia—was for sorrowing poets, lovelorn swains, and other ridiculous figures.
A ducal heir, the war well behind him, had no excuse for such self-indulgence.
I finished the letter listing for my intended the plethora of possible motives for Lord Dantry’s disappearance and noting a complete lack of suspects.
The worst case was that Dantry had simply gone out for a breath of late-night or early-morning air, slipped on an unseen patch of ice, and a conk on the noggin had earned him a pair of wings and a halo.
That Sir Clive might once again be forced to see to a proper send-off for a family member brought low by mortal bad luck was intolerably unfair.
I stared at my epistle thus far—my words bore no semblance to a love letter—and puzzled over how to conclude the dispatch. The correspondence, rather. All best wishes would have been acceptable, but hardly a fitting conclusion to a report on a missing peer and a possibly bereaved neighbor.
All my love? I regularly professed my love for Hyperia, and she reciprocated. The words were important, but also trite somehow.
Looking forward to spring? Callow and coy. Worse than trite.
Forever thine? Affected drivel.
I left the letter on my escritoire and prepared for bed.
The storm Sir Clive had predicted was holding off.
The temperature was bitter and the wind unrelenting.
With a fire roaring in my bedroom hearth, my apartment was nonetheless beset by frigid drafts and chilly eddies.
Even the carpets were cold beneath my stockinged feet as I ran the warmer over my sheets.
I’d survived without shelter in such conditions. I’d endured wintertime captivity in a French chateau that would have made a mausoleum look cozy by comparison. I could put up with a few more weeks of bleak and bitter weather.
I was not at all sure I could survive without the company of my intended, though. Before blowing out the candles, I scrawled a few more words at the bottom of the letter, then added a signature and a short postscript.
Having made a good-faith attempt to communicate honestly with my beloved, I crawled under the covers and embarked on the nightly ordeal that lately passed for my slumbers.
“Lord Julian, how delightful.” Miss Dulcinea Weatherby held out a pale hand for me to bow over. She was tall, slender, pretty in a dark-haired, Celtic fashion and sliding gracefully past her most marriageable years.
She beamed up at me placidly from her Bath chair, then wheeled herself back to allow me to advance into a cozy winter parlor. Despite the late morning hour, candelabras were lit on the two side tables and on each end of the mantel.
The footman who’d shown me into the parlor bowed and withdrew.
“If you’d close the door,” Miss Weatherby said, “we shall have a prayer of not freezing. Uncle Clive is at the home farm, doubtless haranguing our head shepherd. Uncle claims a snowstorm is on the way, and the ewes must be collected into barns and byres.”
To be private with the young lady behind a closed door was not exactly proper, but Miss Weatherby was so clearly content to comport herself as a spinster that I shut the door. I was an all-but-married man, and we were neighbors of long standing.
“Sir Clive told me yesterday that snow is on the way,” I said as she wheeled herself over to the hearth. “I tend to agree. I’ve seldom seen a winter sky so dark and low.”
“Uncle is a weather prophet. I’ll not ring for tea, because you’re staying to lunch. How are you getting on at the Hall all on your lonesome?”
My godmother, Lady Ophelia Oliphant, might have asked me such a question. Direct, well meant, a tad nosy.
“We’re managing.” Not the ducal we, but rather, the Caldicott Hall we. Myself and several dozen staff—and my small nephew, too, of course. That we. “Her Grace should be returning from Hampshire any week now, and lambing has already begun for us as well.” Two bits of good news.
“Uncle has had an occasional note from the duchess. Holiday greetings, he claims. The elders spy on us and on each other shamelessly.” Her smile implied such behavior was endearing, though I found it anything but. A fellow was entitled to some privacy in this life.
I cast about for more small talk. One did not call upon a neighbor and start opening cupboards in search of a missing peer.
“I tried to dissuade Uncle from asking for your help,” Miss Weatherby said.
“If Dantry wanted to lark about Town or tour the dark, satanic mills in the north, he should have left us a note. One might well show up in the afternoon post, but I suspect it more likely that some sort of farewell lies among his voluminous correspondence.”
She’d quoted Blake, and the poet’s sentiments regarding the mills were probably those of a majority of Englishmen.
“You suggest that Dantry is preparing for the political affray by touring mills?” Not a reason to depart from a relative’s home in secrecy, by my lights. Not a reason to leave all of one’s effects behind either.
“Collieries, cotton mills, climbing boys… His lordship had any number of causes, and he was passionate about all of them. Uncle obliged by offering opposing views on most topics. Our supper conversation has been quite lively in recent days.”
Her tone said that conversation had been acrimonious, but such was her inherent good cheer that she relegated those arguments to the heap of minor tribulations generally labeled Adult Male Foibles.
“If he’s not touring mills or mines, where do you suppose Dantry is, and why not leave his host a note of thanks?”
She hefted a workbasket onto her lap, extracted some knitting—light blue wool that matched her eyes—and set the basket back on the floor.
“You would have to know Claude—Lord Dantry—to understand why he might commit such an oversight. He’s not rude by nature.
” She commenced knitting with steady dispatch as she spoke.
“Claude did not expect to inherit so early in life. His papa was quite hale and hearty, as Arbuthnots tend to be even in old age. When the earldom fell into Claude’s lap, it was as if he meant to accomplish every ambition in the first two years of his peerage. ”
Her needles clicked away, a little tattoo I found irritating.
“Claude wrote two dozen letters a day while he was here,” Miss Weatherby went on, “sometimes more. If he wasn’t writing letters, he was drafting pamphlets, reading pamphlets, ciphering over taxation and tariff figures. A March hare daundered along compared to Claude.”
“You and he were friends?” She was not related to the man, being the niece of Sir Clive’s late wife, but she spoke as if she could have been Dantry’s cousin.
“To the extent one can be friends with a human whirlwind.” She finished a row, whipped around the tail of whatever she was working on, and commenced another row.
“Even when Dantry took the occasional nightcap with Uncle, he was spouting ideas and positing theories. You never heard a more articulate opponent of the Corn Laws, nor one with more oratory stamina.”
“Who might want to silence the orator, Miss Weatherby?”
She pushed her stitches around on the needles.
“I’ve considered that question, my lord, and I just…
Claude was a man without malice. He hated the mines, not the mine owners.
He hated the chimneys, not the sweeps who send boys climbing to their deaths.
Claude loved England the way Uncle’s old hounds love their master.
Unshakable positive regard toward the object of their affections, no matter how crotchety, difficult, or unappreciative he might be in a bad moment. ”
Sir Clive did not appear to have any truly bad moments, though he did have a temper. “Might I see the quarters where Lord Dantry was billeted?”