Chapter 5
Chapter Five
“The wind is dropping,” Sir Clive said, settling into a wing chair. “We’ll get either bitter cold or mud on the morrow.”
“Wouldn’t the snow have to stop first?” I took the second wing chair, both seats having been angled to catch the heat of the study’s fire. The pleasure of sitting on toasted cushions was beyond words.
Sir Clive’s sanctum sanctorum might have been a set for a stage play featuring a contented gentry patriarch, except that Sir Clive had no progeny.
He had the loyal hounds, though, both of whom snored gently on the hearth rug.
The art on display included the requisite mantel portrait of his deceased wife in the more ornate styles of the previous century and a pleasant landscape of the Knot in spring verdure behind the massive desk.
A third portrait on the interior wall was probably the young Sir Clive in his regimentals, but a lack of illumination rendered the details in shadow.
“The snow will let up by midnight,” Sir Clive said. “Shall we enjoy a nightcap or admit we’ve had libation enough for one day?”
The wines served with supper had been delectable, probably put on the menu in deference to Lord Dantry’s august company and left there in light of my visit.
“I can do without a brandy, thank you. What can you tell me about Mrs. Stoneham?”
Mine host sighed, and that slight sound conveyed not contentment with warmed cushions in a cozy study, but rather, some sort of disappointment.
In me.
I was tired. I was clad in borrowed clothing and dealing with a family that wanted results without supplying much information.
My day had included a sound drubbing by the elements, strain to my eyes courtesy of Dantry’s prolific pen, invasion of my privacy, and more than a few scolds courtesy of Miss Weatherby.
Then too, I missed my beloved with an ache that would not abate.
Direct speech was called for. “One does not solve puzzles by playing cribbage and wagering on the weather, Sir Clive. I apologize for my lack of small talk, but you did ask for my assistance. One solves puzzles by assembling the pieces and studying them minutely.”
He muttered something that might have included the words Dorothea, insolent, and bedamned. He then pushed himself out of his chair, retrieved a wooden strongbox from a cupboard beneath the windows, and set it on the desk.
“Elizabeth Stoneham is one of my late wife’s godchildren.
” He took a key from under the blotter and studied the lock.
“People conclude that if you haven’t any children of your own, then you must derive solace from spoiling somebody else’s brats.
We were married for quite some time before our Jamie came along, and my dear lady was gifted in those early years with a good dozen godchildren.
When we lost Jamie, did those godchildren bother to look in on the woman who’d been such a beneficent angel to them? Did they even send along a note?”
He put the key in the lock and gave it a good twist. “Lizzie did. Lizzie wrote. She called upon us when we were in Town. She brought up the happy stories about Jamie, when my wife could bear to hear them. When Lizzie got mixed up with that dreadful Stoneham ass, she confided the details to my wife. Never was widowhood a greater gift, but you mustn’t speak ill of him in Lizzie’s presence. She’ll get over that, eventually.”
He collected some papers from inside the strongbox, replaced the key under the blotter, and resumed his seat.
“Shortly before her death, my wife came up with the notion of having Lizzie bide with us as Dulcie’s companion.
Dulcie has resented the arrangement from the first day, though she’s always civil to Lizzie.
Lizzie keeps out of Dulcie’s way, and we bump along, each lady keeping to her side of the hedge.
They should be friends, but try telling a pair of headstrong mares how to sort out the politics of the pasture.
They will agree only that you should not butt in. ”
They would also agree, albeit tacitly, that Sir Clive was all that stood between them and uncertain, if not unpleasant, fates.
“Read these,” Sir Clive said, passing over the documents.
“Lizzie Stoneham is a lady fallen on hard times. Leave her in peace. Dantry was able to make her laugh occasionally, and for that, I do commend him. For the contents of those epistles, I am ready to skewer the boy with a dull pike and have him whipped at the cart’s tail. ”
Dantry, fashionable creature for all his reforming politics, would probably prefer the pike.
The first page was a letter from Sheldon, greeting his lordly brother as Claude-pate.
This is the lot since Christmas. The barbarians are at the gate, your rubbishing lordship, and if one of us does not marry money by Lady Day, I shall be compelled to decamp for the usual affordable foreign ports, simply to escape your duns.
What followed was a collection of importunings, some of them polite, some of them strident, all of them demanding that Dantry pay his bills, or—in the case of irate tenants who’d paid rent timely—that the earl make repairs to leased properties careening toward ruin.
This farmhouse needed a new roof, that one a new well.
Another was in want of marling or fencing or a hog house that post-dated the Great Flood.
“Dantry is in trouble,” I said, shuffling the letters.
“For all we know,” Sir Clive said, “Dantry is in Scotland, where his creditors cannot reach him through the courts. In the alternative, he’s gone to ground at any one of six distant properties associated with the earldom, seven if we count a townhouse in Bath.”
“He’s a peer. He cannot be jailed for debt.” Did Dantry, in all his progressive enthusiasm, rail against the very injustice that assured him of personal liberty regardless of indebtedness?
“He cannot be jailed for debt,” Sir Clive said tiredly, “though Sheldon can. Dantry can be taken to court to seek specific performance of his duties as a landlord. At common law, the tenants can make necessary repairs after having waited years for Dantry to do his part and then deduct the cost of those repairs from rent owing, and even the courts should side with the tenants.”
A roof was a necessity if the whole structure wasn’t to disintegrate. A functional well, decent fences…
Blast and botheration. “This is why Dantry told nobody he was leaving the area? He’s wanted by a mob of creditors and angry tenants?”
Sir Clive pulled off one boot, then the other, drew up a hassock, and rested his stockinged feet on the hassock.
“My lord, I hardly know. Those letters arrived yesterday morning, before the weather went nasty on us, after I had invited you to come calling. I did not read them until just before supper, though a gentleman does not read another gentleman’s mail.
Needs must. I wanted to toss them down the jakes, but that’s apparently what Dantry has done with his common sense.
Too busy making the world safe for crossing sweepers to be bothered with his own affairs. ”
Or too busy flirting with widows and local belles to pay the trades. “I thought Dantry railed against the fate of climbing boys.”
“The earl’s causes are numberless, and he’s passionate about them all. I wish he reserved one scintilla of that passion for checking on his chickens.”
The chickens who were not laying golden eggs. “Are you sending me back to the Hall in light of these letters? Telling me I should allow a peer to run out on his tenants and his creditors?”
Should those be my orders… I wasn’t sure I could obey them.
What if the local belle who’d given Dantry her favors, in addition to her heart, was soon to present him with a child?
What of Miss Weatherby, whose security would be yet still more imperiled with Sheldon kicking his heels in Rome and Dantry nowhere to be found?
What of the tenants and creditors, much less the climbing boys, who did, indeed, face an unjust, dangerous fate?
“I should tell you to cease and desist,” Sir Clive said.
“I should instruct you to make a lot of politely baffled noises, promise to do your best, and then trot off to the Hall, there to lift not one single finger in Dantry’s direction.
Let him court some Scottish heiress whose mama fancies bagging an English earl.
A venerable tradition, and nobody would think less of him for it. ”
Sir Clive was talking himself into giving up on his cousin, and for all I missed the Hall, et cetera and so forth—the Hall, where I had taken to wasting hours with my brooding and more hours cantering aimlessly about the countryside—Sir Clive was not the only party who’d asked me to find Lord Dantry.
Both Miss Weatherby and Mrs. Stoneham had tasked me with the same mission, and they were not on hand to blow retreat.
A silence stretched. The fire burned quietly—no more gusts down the flue—and Sir Clive appeared to be sinking toward sleep. A clock ticked from the gloomy side of the study, and the hounds snored on.
“Nobody looked for me.” I had not meant to say those words, and I wasn’t entirely sure of their significance.
“My French captor assured me of that. He assured me no patrols, scouts, tracking hounds… No effort had been made to find me when I went missing from camp. My failure was simply accepted at face value. I’d let myself be taken captive, or I’d deserted, and that was how I’d be remembered.
A prisoner in all likelihood, a traitor probably, possibly even a fratricide. ”
Sir Clive bestirred himself to scowl at me.
“If you spout that drivel in front of your mother, she will spank you with a stout parasol. Of course an effort was made to find you and that cork-brained brother of yours. Your commanding officers would have rather shot you themselves than allowed you to be subjected to interrogation. For your sake and for theirs. They quietly scoured the countryside, and at Wellington’s personal orders. I’d bet my horse on that.”