Chapter 4
Chapter Four
“Dantry’s hat?” Miss Weatherby presided over a tea tray of plain blue porcelain. Her movements were graceful and steady, her question almost casual. “You are sure the hat was his?”
“Dead certain, my dear,” Sir Clive said.
“Dantry likes a wide band on the inside of his hat to store notes and tickets and the like. He has his top hats made at some little shop off Bond Street, and his initials are embroidered in red thread on the band. Beaver felt, never rabbit. Not your average country squire’s chapeau. ”
She set down the pot, put three lumps of sugar into one cup, and passed it over to Sir Clive. “My lord, how do you prefer your tea?”
“Two lumps and a dash of milk, please. The hat suggests a few possibilities about Lord Dantry’s departure.”
She dropped the lumps into my tea. “He wasn’t kidnapped?”
“We are speculating,” I replied, “but the notion that kidnappers would stop to grab a fellow’s hat and spurs while spiriting him out the door seems farfetched.
To my mind, it’s more likely Dantry took himself for a stroll and bundled up against the cold.
” A stroll, an assignation, to meet a passing stagecoach…
Lord Dantry’s apartment was, like Miss Weatherby’s, on the ground floor of the house.
His rooms opened onto a side portico. Miss Weatherby’s enjoyed direct access to the wide back terrace.
This cozy parlor was across the corridor from Miss Weatherby’s quarters and looked out over the front drive, long since blanketed with snow.
Miss Weatherby poured a dollop of cream into my tea. “Where did you find this hat, Uncle?”
“Along the stream by the lane into the village. I’d say a quarter mile from the coach bridge.” Sir Clive sipped noisily. “Wind blew it right out of my hands into the yews in the hedgerow.”
She passed over my tea. “So Dantry was leaving us? Catching a stage up to Town when we could have sent him north in the comfort of the traveling coach?”
I waited to start on my tea until our hostess had fixed herself a cup, which she did not appear to be interested in doing.
“Catch a stage without luggage?” I asked.
“Without even his traveling desk?” I’d searched that article thoroughly and found only one hidden compartment, in which the earl had stored nothing whatsoever.
“Dantry left behind almost ten pounds in coins. How much more did he have on hand to take with him?”
“Nobody carries ten pounds about the countryside,” Sir Clive said. “Perhaps Dantry took only enough to buy coach fare to wherever he went. Very odd, though, to leave in the dark and without a word. No indication where we’re to send his things or what to do with the coin.”
“Worrisome,” Miss Weatherby said. “Have some biscuits, Uncle. I asked Cook to move supper up, but a roast cannot be hurried.”
“Will you have some tea, Miss Weatherby?” I asked.
“None for me, my lord. Please enjoy yours while it’s hot. What do you make of this mysterious hat by the stream?”
I wasn’t certain how much to say. “Had Dantry developed a tendresse for any of the local ladies?”
“If he developed it in less than a fortnight,” Sir Clive said around a mouthful of butter biscuit, “it wasn’t a tendresse.”
“Uncle, mind your tongue.”
“Well, the man’s an Arbuthnot in the prime of his life, Dulcie. Nature doesn’t cease to operate just because we dress it up in fancy breeches and embroidered waistcoats. Camouflage doesn’t change the basic nature of the creature.”
Miss Weatherby held a plate of apple tarts in my direction. “If Lord Dantry was meeting a lady, he said nothing to me about it.”
I took two tarts. They appeared to be glazed with honey and dusted with cinnamon, and one bite confirmed that Mrs. Gwinnett would win the toddy sweepstakes by four lengths, but the Knot’s cook knew her way around apple tarts. Light, flaky pastry, lovely spices, not too sweet, not too dry.
“Would Dantry have confided in you regarding a local liaison?” I asked. “I apologize for the nature of the question, Miss Weatherby, but the man is missing, and the weather has grown most inclement.”
Her gaze went to the window, beyond which all was gray gloom. Half the twilight was due to the heavy snowfall, the other to the advancing afternoon hour. The snow had slowed from a white cascade to merely heavy, with no indication of any further letup.
“Dantry had a capacity for romance,” she said slowly.
“He read the Lake poets to revive his spirits when he’d been too long at his correspondence.
He also liked to pass the time in the local snug of an evening.
The walk refreshed his mind, the company improved his mood, and an hour later, he’d return to the Knot, ready to burn the midnight oil over poor relief or the soap tax. ”
“Taxes.” Sir Clive helped himself to two more biscuits.
“If there was a topic on which the earl was loquacious, it was taxes. He was for taxing the few comforts John Bull can rely on—tea, sugar, rum, gin, tobacco, and coffee—because, to hear Dantry tell it, those pleasures make a body more capable of enduring factory work and less likely to heckle Parliament about real reform. I have never met the tenant farmer or drover who has any interest in heckling Parliament about anything, regardless of the contents of his flask.”
“And yet,” I said, “you’ve also never met the factory worker who is either healthy or happy, and in their misery, they turn to the exceptionally affordable spirits that have been kindly set by their relatively empty plates.” To say nothing of the origins of sugar, rum, and tobacco.
Miss Weatherby studied me while the fire gently roared, the mantel clock ticked, and the storm raged on.
“Dantry would agree with you,” Sir Clive said, which I took for an olive branch. “Wherever he is.”
“As soon as the lanes are passable, we’ll know more,” I said. “If he bought a stagecoach fare, that will have been remarked. He’s a local luminary, and his comings and goings will be noted.”
“True enough.” Sir Clive helped himself to the last biscuit on the plate.
“We only get two coaches a day each direction. One travels between London and the coast. The other starts off from or heads to Canterbury. I can’t think Dantry had any business in Canterbury, but the family seat is to the east of here. ”
“Have you notified Sheldon that his brother is missing?” I asked.
Miss Weatherby shook her head. “In the absence of signs of mischief, we did not want to alarm anybody.”
The potential for foul play was abundant.
Dantry was politically influential and had annoyed many men even more powerful than he, his absence had no explanation, and he was wealthy.
A kidnapping that had begun as an innocent stroll to the village was all too likely, when Dantry had made that stroll part of his evening routine.
“My alarm is tempered by the discovery of these in Lord Dantry’s wardrobe.” I withdrew from my breast pocket a packet of letters bound up with a red ribbon. “I haven’t read them all. They are from a lady and private in nature.”
Sir Clive wrinkled his nose. “Billets-doux? Bad form to leave them where they can be found. The boot-boy or any chambermaid might have spotted them in the wardrobe.”
“The ink is fresh,” I said. “The signature is ‘Your Darling B’ or ‘Your Devoted B.’ On one, it’s simply the letter B.” The paper was unremarkable, without even a foolscap watermark, the penmanship and spelling equally unforthcoming. Tidy, correct, without flourishes even in the signature.
Miss Weatherby held out her hand for the packet. She untied the ribbon, unfolded the first letter, and set the others on the tea tray.
“‘My heart is as light as sunbeams just to know you are near, and I count each passing minute until I can again see your beloved face.’ She’s not a poet.”
I’d had the same reaction. The sentiments were high-flown, but the prose…
Why not your beloved countenance? Your beloved visage?
Why not behold or gaze upon or feast my eyes upon that dear physiognomy?
I’d written out enough maudlin correspondence for my illiterate fellow soldiers to know that even half-drunken privates could do better than see your beloved face.
Miss Weatherby unfolded another. “‘You do me such great honor, I can hardly believe my good fortune. Surely, I am dreaming?’ Are we to believe Dantry proposed to this woman?”
“No.” Sir Clive placidly munched his biscuit. “It’s not proposing unless marriage follows. Sorry to be indelicate, my dear.”
Miss Weatherby moved on to the third, which I had not read. “‘Dearest darling, I can hardly wait until the next time we can be together. I am giddy with the memory of the pleasures we’ve shared.’ She’s not giddy. She’s a flaming fool to pen drivel such as this.”
“Or,” I said, “she is very much in love, and Dantry, being equally smitten, was imprudent enough to allow her to continue memorializing her sentiments, and to keep her letters rather than burn them.”
“Dantry did not elope,” Sir Clive said, banging a fist on the arm of his chair. “Arbuthnots don’t go in for running off to Scotland to speak our vows over the anvil. We court our ladies good and proper, and none of these havey-cavey, sheep’s eyes, come-be-my-love dramatics.”
I wasn’t so sure. The letters were real, and Dantry was absent without leave. “Might Dantry have left to elude the lady’s importuning?”
Were his strolls to the village a means of retrieving her maudlin notes from the proverbial oak tree before anybody else could come upon them? Perhaps a way to tryst with the woman in secret until he could escape her fascination with him?
“The theory that his lordship caught the eye of a lovesick schoolgirl is not as outlandish as it seems,” Miss Weatherby said.
“Dantry was all fire and lofty rhetoric when it came to his political causes. In social situations, he had reliable manners and great good looks, but he wasn’t all that adept at… ”