Chapter 4 #3
A noise in the sitting room stilled my thoughts. The movements were furtive. Not a maid or footman bringing around a fresh supply of peat. I turned down the wick on the sconce and went to the bedroom door.
A woman was quietly opening and closing the drawers of the desk, one by one. She apparently did not find what she sought. She next examined the drawers at the foot of the wardrobe, and when that exercise proved fruitless, she eyed the half-ajar bedroom door with something approaching distaste.
I put her age at about thirty. She was pretty in an unadorned, purposely plain fashion. Blond hair in a simple bun, afternoon dress of gray velvet, shawl of lighter gray. A light build, bordering on petite. A widow perhaps. Certainly not a maid and certainly not welcome to search my quarters.
“You might try the sideboard,” I said, emerging from the bedroom. “I haven’t looked in there yet myself. Shall we take a peek together?”
“Who are you?” She’d tried for an indignant tone and landed somewhere between trepidation and terror. Granted, my looks were unusual—my hair was gradually turning from white back to its original auburn, and I was a bit on the lean side—but my appearance no longer qualified as ghoulish.
“Lord Julian Caldicott, at your service.” I bowed, though even a gentleman probably did not owe a prospective thief his best manners. “And you would be?”
“Nobody told me you were staying over.”
“Nobody told me either, but the weather made other plans.” I went to the sideboard and opened the cupboards one by one. A few dusty decanters and equally dusty glasses graced the shelves, along with an extra porcelain basin and pitcher and a lap robe and shawl of matching brown merino.
A pair of ladies’ gloves, fur-lined, sat atop the lap robe.
“Might these be yours?”
“Mrs. Elizabeth Stoneham,” she said, dipping a hint of a curtsey and then snatching the gloves from me. “I’m sorry to have intruded, but I wasn’t made aware that these rooms were occupied. I’ll just be going.”
I’d been hoping for a Belinda, Beatrice, or Beulah. “You are Miss Weatherby’s companion?”
“I am.” Said with a lift of a firm chin. “I suppose I’ll see you at supper, and I will trust your discretion regarding my misplaced gloves.”
“Dantry moved them, didn’t he?”
She was clearly torn between the prudent deference she typically showed her social superiors and the need to say as little as possible to anybody.
“I do not know you, my lord. What right have you to interrogate me regarding something as trivial as a pair of old gloves?”
For old gloves, they’d be warm. They were also clearly her old gloves.
“You left them in the desk. Dantry found them, and he moved them, lest anybody rummaging for a penknife come upon them and draw conclusions.” A glove was as trite a choice of a romantic token as a lock of hair or pressed flowers.
“Clearly, my lord has no need of my perspective, having fabricated a suitable explanation of his own. Until supper.”
She was halfway to the door before I addressed her.
“Lord Dantry has gone missing, Mrs. Stoneham, and now we are beset by dangerously foul weather. Neither Sir Clive nor Miss Weatherby have any idea where the earl has gone, and we fear the worst. I am already in possession of some evidence that a romantic entanglement might have fueled his clandestine departure. Now you give me more of same. Was he trysting with you?”
Her shield of widowed dignity cracked as she faced me. “Claude has gone missing?”
Claude? Ye gods and prancing lordlings. The family earl deserved a thrashing. “Lord Dantry did not come down to breakfast on Wednesday, and Sir Clive professes no knowledge of his whereabouts.”
“I thought he’d simply nipped up to Town. Parliament is about to sit, and Claude would never have missed… But nobody tells me anything.”
And she did not ask, for fear of jeopardizing the post that was likely her last defense against penury. How I wished and wished and wished that Hyperia were biding at the Knot with me.
“Mrs. Stoneham, please believe I have no interest in prying into personal matters. My sole objective is to locate Dantry, which is becoming as likely as locating a sober drover in Smithfield. The earl’s political views made him unpopular in Tory circles, his brother might well be plotting against him for the usual melodramatic reasons, or he might have creditors on his tail, chasing him straight into the River Tick. ”
Bond Street plumage, three watches, a jewelry case brimming with sparkling little fashion statements… Unless Lord Dantry’s acres prospered wildly, he was as impoverished as most of the aristocracy.
Mrs. Stoneham smoothed a hand over the gloves. “Claude has creditors. What peer doesn’t? He also has good taste. My late husband…”
Her husband’s fashion sense had doubtless left her nearly bankrupt. “What sort of creditors does Dantry have?”
“All the very best ones. Hoby’s, every Whig club in Town, Tatts, Twining’s. Only the top of the line would do, and his lordship did enjoy a fine brandy from time to time.”
How did she know these aspects of a peer whose own relatives professed ignorance of his finances?
“Mrs. Stoneham, can you think of any reason why Dantry would have literally disappeared into the night?”
“I can think of many. If Sheldon were in some sort of scandalous trouble, Claude would have dropped everything and run to his brother’s aid. A political rival might have arranged for Claude to have an accident. Politics can turn dirty, and Claude wouldn’t see a low blow coming.”
I was put in mind of my late brother, Harry, who’d consorted with the distaff for intelligence-gathering purposes, never once admitting that the ladies might have had similarly nefarious motives for accepting his advances.
“What of an affair of the heart?” I asked. “Would Dantry have eloped with a questionable prospective countess or fled a jealous papa’s ire?”
Awkward question. Mrs. Stoneham had either left the gloves in Dantry’s quarters to implicate him in an imaginary affair, or she’d enjoyed his company behind a closed door and had retrieved the gloves to prevent him from being implicated.
“What jealous papa in this benighted shire would confront a peer of the realm, my lord? And why would an earl need to elope? He can marry wherever he pleases, and while his wife might not be socially accepted, he always will be.”
Said with some bitterness. “What was Dantry to you?”
The bitterness faded to sadness. “A friend. Nothing more and nothing less. Please do find him, my lord. Claude—the earl—is a good man, too good for this wretched nation of plundering peers. We need him in the political lists, whether or not he can pay his bootmaker.”
The bootmaker—and haberdasher, glovemaker, tailor, wine merchant, tea shop, and clubs—might disagree with that sentiment.
“I will do my best,” I said. “Until supper, Mrs. Stoneham, and yes, you can trust my discretion, unless and until I have any reason to believe his lordship’s difficulties can be laid at your feet.”
She looked like she’d say more, but the second supper bell rang. I went to the door, looked out, saw a deserted corridor, motioned to her, and stepped back.
She was gone on silent feet, her gloves stashed in a pocket. She left behind more questions than answers.
I put my epistle to Hyperia into Dantry’s traveling desk, twisted the key in the lock, and slipped it into my pocket.
When I left for supper, I also looped a single hair around the outside of the latch to the door of my apartment. The Knot was becoming a house of mystery, and sometimes, the simplest measures could point in the direction of the most arcane solutions.