Chapter 2 #2
“Of course.” She arranged her knitting atop the basket and wheeled toward the door.
“I haven’t had his rooms cleaned or aired, lest Uncle be upset with me, though we have washed the sheets.
Uncle is the soul of consideration where I’m concerned, always has been, but he’s hoping Dantry will come striding into the breakfast parlor, reporting on some new social evil that must be put to rights immediately. ”
I did not know the etiquette of dealing with a lady who occupied a Bath chair. Hyperia would have been able to enlighten me of a certainty. She would also have known how to guide the conversation to more pertinent topics.
Did Dantry have particular lady friends of the proper or improper sort?
Did he gamble or wager?
Was the earldom solvent?
What of Sheldon? Did he truly like his older brother, or did he excel at giving that impression while harboring dangerous resentments?
These questions and others swirled in my mind as I followed Miss Weatherby down the corridor. The floors were not carpeted, probably in deference to her chair, meaning my footsteps thumped on bare wood.
“Dantry’s quarters,” she said, opening a door, pushing it wide, then wheeling herself through.
“I should have held the door for you.”
She looked fleetingly annoyed, then her brisk good cheer reasserted itself.
“The corridors are not wide enough. To hold the door, you would have had to sidle past my chair, edge in front of me, open the door, then step aside again so I could pass through. A lot of bother for a societal nicety that implies women lack the use of their own hands.”
As I understood the courtesy, thanks to multiple sisters delivering myriad harangues, women needed those hands to collect skirts, or trains, or shawls and other whatnot that could get caught on door latches.
One did not argue with a lady. “How long had Dantry been visiting at the Knot?”
“Since the turn of the New Year. You see what I mean about his correspondence.”
The room itself was pleasant, or as pleasant as any unoccupied accommodations could be on a cold winter day. A low fire burned in the hearth, probably in anticipation of some protracted cleaning and tidying. The only other illumination came from a sconce lit by the door.
The desk by the window was a substantial article with some pretty inlay around the edges and the Arbuthnot family crest carved into the main outfacing panel—crossed spurs and some sort of curving green bough.
The carpet was a sturdy Axminster, the short sofa and reading chair upholstered in the same chocolate hue as the velvet curtains.
A wilting bouquet of camellias graced the sideboard, as did a trio of decanters, all at least half full.
The appointments were clean and comfortable, up to manor house guest room standards despite being far from new.
Almost every level surface, though, bore a weight of documents of some sort.
Pamphlets were ubiquitous, stacked on the mantel and along the edges of the desk.
Letters, unfolded, folded, not yet opened, or sealed but not yet sent, adorned the blotter.
The sideboard held books and notebooks, and even the chair and sofa sported stacks of newspapers and periodicals.
A stiff breeze would result in a paper storm worthy of the winter furies, and somewhere among this literary flotsam and jetsam might be answers regarding Lord Dantry’s present whereabouts.
“He was always wielding his pen,” Miss Weatherby said, wheeling to the hearth. “An epistolary whirlwind, and Claude was with us for a mere fortnight. The family seat must rival the Board of Excise for papers, ledgers, and inkpots.”
She tipped the hearth screen back, speared a square of peat onto the fire, and replaced the poker and screen in their original positions.
She could have allowed me to do that.
“Most people get around to asking,” she said, maneuvering her chair back from the hearth. “I suppose you already know.”
Cold air gusted in from the corridor. “I beg your pardon?”
“How did I come to be incapacitated. I hate that word. I am no more ‘incapacitated’ than Nelson was incapacitated by the loss of an eye. I must contend with certain challenges. I am excused from contending with others. Nobody expects me to linger in the churchyard, for example, though I am as capable of gossiping as the next person. I was in a buggy accident when I was thirteen.”
I wanted to light more candles to signal my greater interest in Lord Dantry’s effects than in Miss Weatherby’s past.
Cowardly of me. “I’m sorry. One has high expectations of the future at thirteen. Learning to live with an injury must have been daunting.”
She peered up at me in the gloom. “You speak from experience. Uncle says soldiers regard wounds as badges of honor. He was shot and lucky to live. I did not feel very lucky when the physicians told me I’d never walk again.”
“Were they right?” One soldier might ask another such a question, which was no excuse for my blunt inquiry.
“Not quite. I can hobble about for a bit on my good days. Two canes, at least, but my knee doesn’t work, and putting weight on it…
I pay dearly for my excesses. My skirts got caught as the buggy overturned, and my knee took the brunt of what ensued.
A lady does not mention that part of her anatomy.
My life is circumscribed by my knee—the left one—or would be if I allowed it to be. ”
“But you don’t.” I wore blue spectacles in bright light, lest I suffer the headaches of the damned. Sometimes the headaches came anyway. I’d been too close to an exploding powder wagon early in my military career, and ever since, I kept my tinted specs handy and had several spare pairs.
“One can but try, my lord. One of Claude’s most endearing qualities was that he engaged with my wits and not with my Bath chair.
If I told him that cobbled walkways in London ought to be outlawed in favor of flagstones, he went off into flights about expenses, drainage properties of each type of surface and durability.
He did not send furtive, pitying glances at my skirts. ”
I set about lighting a few more candles. We were having a frank discussion, not an exchange of confidences.
“You respect him.”
“If we had a Parliament full of Lord Dantrys, the rubbishing Corn Laws would never have been passed. Climbing boys would be clerks, and you’d have no women and children toiling away in the mines.”
High praise, from her, but how would the families of those women and children afford a roof over their heads, much less bread and ale, without the wages earned grubbing coal?
My brother Arthur would have known all the arguments and counterarguments, along with legal citations, pithy quotes, facts, and figures.
I knew I preferred the smell of peat to burning coal, for many reasons.
“I can guess what you’re thinking,” Miss Weatherby said.
“But if we paid the men more than a pittance, then the women and children wouldn’t have to work below the surface.
The children could be educated in more useful trades, and we’d no longer see our best and brightest fleeing to foreign shores.
But that would require the mine owners to share some of their lucre with the people who earned it for them. ”
Hyperia would like Miss Weatherby for the sheer mental fortitude of her politics. I was more concerned with finding Lord Dantry, who might be able to move Merry Olde in the direction of these lofty aspirations.
“Lord Dantry is a radical?”
“Interesting isn’t it, how anybody who expects Christian behavior of the aristocracy is a radical, while that same aristocracy gleefully quotes a fratricide to justify their greed.”
And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?
“Lord Dantry was a good man.” Miss Weatherby surveyed the evidence of the good man’s industry.
“I do hope you can put Uncle’s mind at ease regarding his lordship’s fate.
I must see to lunch. We’re to dine at one of the clock, and we shall, whether or not Uncle recalls the hour and tears himself away from his ewes. ”
I bowed, but she’d already brought her chair about and traveled half the distance to the door.
She reversed abruptly. “I apologize for my temper. Winter sees me stuck in this house, day after day, and what might be a badge of honor to a former soldier is purely a nuisance to me. Not an incapacity, a nuisance. Until luncheon, my lord.”
I presumed so far as to close the door in her wake, though I was sure she could have managed that exercise handily.
Miss Weatherby made me uncomfortable, even as I admired her forthright manner and even—for the most part—her political leanings. The Bath chair was part of my unease.
What merciful Deity would impose that penance on a thirteen-year-old girl simply for sitting in the wrong buggy on the wrong day? She might have already lost her parents by that point, another undeserved blow.
How was a woman to put such sorrows behind her when she was daily reminded of her losses?
I set aside that imponderable and took the chair at the desk.
The window kept the air in that part of the room chilly, so I eventually migrated to the reading chair near the hearth.
Dantry had yet to learn the lesson I’d mastered a good year into my tenure as Arthur’s ducal supernumerary: Clerks could be the salvation of any enterprise, provided they were competent and well managed.
Dantry’s correspondents came from every walk of life.
A newspaper editor politely refusing to print his lordship’s latest polemic against rotten boroughs.
A satirical cartoonist appreciating his lordship’s tirades regarding the poor laws and making no commitment to ever immortalize such sentiments on paper.
A Canterbury tailor reminding the earl that the first of the year had come and gone, and just debts must be paid when due.
I threw more peat on the fire as the wind grew more fierce. A luncheon tray appeared courtesy of a brawny young footman.
“Miss Dulcie says if you aren’t to be caught by the snow, you’d best keep to your labors, my lord. Sir Clive hasn’t returned from the home farm.”
“Is Miss Weatherby concerned for her uncle?” I was. Bitter wind could kill a man much faster than could a still, cold day.
“Sir Clive likes the out of doors,” the footman said, doubtless quoting oft-exchanged wisdom from belowstairs.
“He’s a tough old boot, meaning no disrespect.
He’ll come in bellerin’ for his hot buttered rum.
The old hounds will trail about him, sniffing at his boots, until he settles in his study with his London papers. ”
One of the clock, but the leaden sky looked closer to day’s end. “Let’s hope he’s soon returned to home and hearth. Thank you for the meal. Please let the stable know I’ll be departing in an hour or so. My tiger will see to the horses if the grooms are at their nooning.”
My tiger, Atticus, would have already stuffed himself to the gills with whatever was on offer in the Knot’s kitchen. Atticus was small for his age and managed a fine impression of a starving urchin when it suited him to do so.
I returned to my reading chair, feeling a growing sense of frustration.
Lord Dantry took his political obligations seriously and had his fingers in so many committees, local chapters, informal organizations, and neighborhood discussion groups that finding any sort of pattern in his associations, or breaks in such a pattern, would be a monumental task.
I switched to reading his copy books, where he’d worked out drafts of his outgoing correspondence. The hand was neat, but the thought process was untidy. Many a phrase or word had been crossed out, replaced, then the replacement crossed out and so forth.
The real man hid beneath all this political rhetoric and zeal. The real man, who’d apparently made some real enemies, still eluded me.
One point became clear, though, as I munched on cheese toast that fared poorly in comparison to Mrs. Gwinnett’s offerings of the same name: Miss Weatherby’s Bath chair had thrown me off stride, but I’d encountered many an officer convalescing with the same apparatus, or resigned to relying on it for life.
Her politics made me uneasy as well, showing a great aptitude for naming obvious problems and credible solutions, but having no real means for implementing those solutions.
What bothered me most, though, was that in nearly every reference to Lord Dantry, she’d spoken in the past tense. Lord Dantry was a good man.
Why was she so quick to strike him from the rolls of the living, and what did she know that she wasn’t telling?
I withdrew a small notebook from my breast pocket and jotted down that query: Why past tense? What does she know? Is she trying to protect someone?
Or had Miss Weatherby herself somehow authored the earl’s disappearance? She’d already admitted that she could walk. She was blazingly intelligent, and she was angry. None of that added up to a motive, but it pointed to both means and opportunity.
I was still ruminating on possibilities when a particularly fierce gust of wind had me looking out the window.
I wasn’t going anywhere. Not in the next hour, maybe not for the next day or two. Snow was coming down in the sort of fine cascade that would add up quickly and show mercy to neither man nor beast.