Chapter 6
Chapter Six
“Did you enjoy your outing, my lord?” Miss Weatherby sat behind Dantry’s escritoire, the blue shawl wrapped about her shoulders. She’d opened the curtains on every window, and thus the sitting room was flooded with early-afternoon light.
I kept my specs on my nose. “I made the acquaintance of the best baked potatoes served this side of kingdom come, or perhaps the mulled cider enjoyed that appellation. In any case, yes, somewhat to my surprise. Little Middleton has a certain charm.”
“Uncle strives very hard to keep that charm alive. The locals have sense enough to appreciate him for it. Please feel free to change out of your boots. Foul weather creates certain exigencies which we can accommodate with common sense.”
She put both hands on the blotter and pushed herself upright, then swung her beam end about and resettled in the Bath chair, which had been parked beside the desk.
If she could execute that maneuver before a guest, I could free myself from a very cold, damp pair of boots while she looked on.
“I inspected the place where Sir Clive found Dantry’s hat, to the extent one can inspect anything with this much fresh snow on the ground.”
“And?” She adjusted her shawl, again being careful to keep the trailing ends away from her wheels.
“And the only remarkable feature about that bend in the stream is that it’s sheltered from view in either direction along the lane. Because of the yews, because of the curve of the lane and the course of the stream, that spot is visually private.”
“I’m familiar with it,” she said, frowning. “A natural inglenook. Why would Dantry tarry there, though?”
To heed the call of nature? No other innocent explanation came to mind.
“To tryst, Miss Weatherby. I did not inquire among the grooms, but I suspect that location is frequented by courting couples. It’s less than half a mile from the village green and about the same distance to the Knot.
Then too, the sound of the stream would help keep conversations from being overheard, even by someone traveling along the lane itself just a few yards away. ”
I sank into a wing chair and pulled off a boot.
I preferred my tall boots somewhat looser than fashion dictated, for reasons having to do with both comfort and common sense.
Boots that would not admit of a spare pair of wool socks were of little practical use much of the year.
Regimental cobblers learned that lesson early and well.
“If Dantry was involved in a romantic rendezvous,” Miss Weatherby said, “he’d hardly trek half a mile to steal the kisses of somebody here at the Knot. His amour, if he has one, hails from the village.”
She was tacitly ruling out Mrs. Stoneham. I wasn’t convinced. “If he wanted to avoid all the prying eyes at the Knot, he’d plan his rendezvous with the parlormaid in a secluded copse halfway to the village.”
I tugged off the second boot. Both feet itched abominably, but I wasn’t about to add insult to unconventional informality by scratching.
“You don’t think he has an amour,” I said, sliding my feet into a pair of house slippers, rising, and putting the boots in the dressing closet.
She surveyed the stacks and piles of papers around the room.
“When would Claude have had time? This,”—she gestured with one hand, the shawl making the movement more dramatic—“was his passion. I challenged him to support his causes with more than words, words, and yet still more words. He dwelled behind walls of words. Any woman attempting to scale those walls would find the climb long and difficult.”
Miss Weatherby had again lapsed into the past tense. “You want him to support charities?” Singularly difficult, given what I knew of the earl’s finances.
“Of course I wanted him to support charities, but I also wanted him to act. Miss West’s brother has written stage plays that satirize polite society’s courting games, showing them up for the glorified heifer auctions that they are. Mr. West uses words, but he’s also taking action.”
A woman dependent on a Bath chair might have every reason to admire a man who battled on behalf of his ideals with deeds as well as documents.
“Heifer auctions?” Hyperia would adore the term for the same reasons it made me uncomfortable. Too close to the mark.
“You would not believe the men who have presumed to call upon me here, my lord, because I am likely to inherit the Knot. Strutting nincompoops who ought not to be allowed to darken Sir Clive’s hog house door.
If Claude has married some notorious madam, then at least he’s taken a visible step toward rubbing Society’s face in its own hypocrisy. ”
“That’s your notion of taking action against poverty and injustice?” Hyperia would not merely like Miss Weatherby, she’d adore the woman.
“You took aim at a bunch of skinny Frenchmen who’d no more done you a bad turn than you had stolen their rations, all so a lot of bankers, merchants, and titles could keep peddling their wares on the Continent.”
I’d heard that perspective raised only quietly, late at night, in clubs beneath the notice of the bankers and titles. We’d fought to lift Napoleon’s blockade and called it liberating France so the rank and file soldiers could boast of their sacrifices.
“The French soldiers had no rations to speak of,” I said, tugging a pair of curtains half closed. “They were to sustain themselves by plundering the countryside and stealing the enemy’s stores. We are very far afield from the topic of finding Lord Dantry.”
And I was growing irritated. Miss Weatherby might make use of a wheeled chair, but if any party sought battles with the unsuspecting, it was she.
In the next moment, I mentally heard Hyperia gently suggesting that Miss Weatherby was worried for the earl and that, for some people, worry could wear a cross expression.
“I suggested,” Miss Weatherby said quietly, “that Claude pay the debts of some of the poor wretches in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison and publish their stories.
That he spend a night in its noisome confines.
That he pretend to be a wretched soul put on the parish for a few days, the better to shock his peers into heeding all of his useless, pretty words.
Then Claude would be speaking and writing from experience, however limited, not simply from guilt. ”
Brilliant—if dangerous—tactics. The penny press would publish the earl’s dispatches from Portsmouth to John o’ Groats. “You are a firebrand, Miss Weatherby.”
She smiled serenely. “Thank you. My own cause would be a crusade against cobblestone walkways. Do you know how much a Bath chair costs? Do you know how much Sir Clive had to spend to have all the paths paved with flagstones?”
“A small fortune?” I contemplated spending a day navigating life in a chair such as hers and felt a rising of the anxious, claustrophobic fears I associated with captivity.
“Sir Clive never explained to me what he was about. He brought in a pair of masons, put some undergardeners at their disposal, and that autumn, when my aunt held a garden party, I could attend. I could mingle. I could move about, more or less, at will. Uncle took action. Claude, on the other hand…” She sighed and shook her head. “He means well.”
In the opinion of some, Dantry and his causes represented nothing less than the end of the established order. “What else did you and Dantry argue about?”
“Everything.” A wistful admission. “I told him to choose one or two issues and hammer on them—morally, financially, and pragmatically—until cracks formed in the opposition.
His epistolary cannonade of eloquence amounts to sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Birdshot aimed at an empty blue sky when he could instead fire off a Congreve rocket.
“He must achieve one victory,” she went on, “any small victory, and he will become a conqueror, no matter how small his resulting demesne. Then he should take on another battle, and each time he prevails, each time he gives a good account of himself, he will be viewed as a man you’d rather have as an ally than an opponent. ”
She’d promoted him into the present tense when it came to his political machinations. Interesting.
“Like the abolitionists?” I asked. They’d had one issue—were still about it, in some regards—and had accepted any and all allies who joined them on that narrow ground, even the goodwives who bought the household’s weekly stores of sugar and molasses.
“Gain some high ground and then woe to any whose causes you oppose?”
She snatched a pamphlet from the blotter and waved it at me.
“If Mr. Wilberforce decided that parasols were immoral and contrary to the health of England’s womenfolk, the parasol industry would collapse overnight, my lord.
He hasn’t likely given parasols a single thought, ever, but prevailing on one issue has gained him that much authority. ”
“You have given a great deal of thought to politics, Miss Weatherby, while Sir Clive hardly seems to regard the topic at all.”
She set the pamphlet back atop the stack.
“Sir Clive is a consummate politician, or a consummate diplomat. He started with the Bath chair. Would I be willing to try one? Would I allow myself to be measured for one, just in case my knee never regained its strength? It needn’t be just a push chair.
He could have one made that I could maneuver myself…
He was like a millwheel pouring sweet reason all over my resistance. ”
“You were determined to walk?”
“I was fifteen by then. I’d seen enough physicians and quacks… The Scottish doctors put the situation to me plainly, but I still hoped. I was young, I had made progress, I was determined. The pain was bearable.”
Bearable for about two interminable minutes, I’d guess. “What changed your mind?”