Chapter 9 #2
My beloved had no response. She drifted on slumber’s outgoing tide, and I was tempted to drift with her, there in Sir Clive’s cozy study in his delightfully commodious wing chair. We were engaged, and nobody in Sir Clive’s household would have judged us for such a lapse.
“Perry?”
Her lips parted on a soft sigh.
“Dearest lady?”
Silence.
I rose with her in my arms, navigated the door latch with a bit of maneuvering, and started for the steps.
“No, Jules. Not up there.”
A thousand thoughts chased one another around in my tired mind. “With me?”
“Hmm. With you. Cozier.”
Well.
A more honorable man would have set the lady on her feet, reminded her that her affianced groom had some half-witted tendencies that had recently been in evidence.
He would have confessed to her that his investigating days were all but over, just in case that development affected her decision to marry him.
I instead negotiated another doorway without rousing the lady and laid her on the bed, which I fully intended to share with her. We dispensed with our clothing in a fog of fatigue, and to my surprise, I found a lady’s nightgown folded among my clean shirts.
“Heaven bless a woman who knows her mind.” And pray she doesn’t change it.
I climbed in beside Hyperia, wrapped myself around her, and for the second time in a week, enjoyed a night entirely free of nightmares, waking terrors, and ghosts.
Not free of worries, though. Even with Hyperia dozing peacefully beside me, I could not escape myriad, damnable worries.
“I wouldn’t mind a bit more snow.” The friendly footman swept the night’s ashes from the sitting room hearth as he spoke.
“The bad weather evens things up a bit.” His name was Hammond, though he was a Tamworth on his mother’s side—and, strictly speaking, he was the first footman, though what with the butler stuck in Cleverton Unthank, visiting a sister who’d taken sick, Hammond was also fulfilling that more senior role.
All of which he recounted while tending to the hearth.
“What manner of ‘things’ does foul weather even up?” I asked, though chatting with the domestic staff was not on my morning’s agenda.
I’d deposited a sleepy Hyperia in her own bed as a chilly gray dawn had edged around the curtains. Not a soul had been stirring abovestairs, fortunately. I’d returned to Dantry’s quarters, sat myself at his escritoire, and resumed sorting through his hoard of letters.
Was B Mrs. Elizabeth Stoneham? I could not see her penning the utter drivel Dantry had received from his inamorata, but even Sir Clive had noted a congenial relationship between the earl and the widow.
Could Miss Weatherby—Weather-B?—have sent him those notes?
Again, the lady was too sensible by half, and in all her discourse relating to the earl, she’d never once hinted that she held him in intimate esteem.
Sheldon wasn’t certain his older brother even grasped the particulars involved with intimate esteem.
Hammond finished collecting the ashes, rearranged the remaining coals, and tossed another square of peat onto the flames.
“I refer to the flirting sweepstakes, milord. Little Middleton is uncommonly blessed with fair young maids, and life in service can be lonely. The gardeners have an advantage come winter, because their duties at the Knot run light in cold weather. The stable lads have less work in the warmer months, because most of the horses are at grass the livelong day.”
Life from a young bachelor’s perspective. “And the house staff?”
“Our work varies on no particular pattern. If Sir Clive is entertaining, we’re busier. If Miss Dulcie puts us to some big project—the windows are endless in this house—we’re busier, but we’re never run off our feet, because Sir Clive doesn’t hold with forced marches.”
The hearth was as spotless as it could have been, and yet, Hammond kept fussing, whisking the little broom here and there over the stones, adjusting the screen just so.
I set aside a bill from a chandler in the West Riding whose deferential tone was exceeded only by his determination to be paid.
“What do you make of the earl, Hammond? I am trying to find the man, but I never knew him beyond a passing greeting. All of this,”—I waved a hand at the stacks of pamphlets on the blotter—“hasn’t told me why he might have gone missing. Elopement comes to mind, but with whom and why?”
“His lordship weren’t a flirt,” Hammond said, rearranging the hearth set. “That would have been unsporting for a toff to make the local fellows look bad before the ladies. The earl weren’t unsporting, ever.”
High and earnest praise. “Dantry did not flirt with the blacksmith’s daughter, but might he have flirted with the vicar’s spinster sister?”
“Vicar don’t have a… Oh. I see. Vicar Goodenough has two daughters.
One of them is a real hoyden when Papa’s back is turned.
Sir Clive has made it very plain we’re to give Miss Biddie a wide berth, so to speak.
Sir Clive says there’s a reason why it’s called parson’s mousetrap, if you take my meaning. ”
“Miss Biddie?”
“Boudica, from history. Parson Goodenough does like his history. Her younger sister, Miss Theda, is still in the schoolroom and is a bookish sort.”
“If Lord Dantry isn’t a flirt, Hammond, then what sort of man is he truly? What kind of problem would make him disappear? Who would take him into such intense dislike that they’d lure him to his doom?”
Hammond stared hard at the decanters on the sideboard. “You ever read that story about the mad old knight? He went charging at windmills and thought they was dragons? He fell in love with a light-skirts and thought she was a princess?”
“Don Quixote. A venerable and interesting tale, originally written in Spanish.”
“His lordship is like that mad knight in a way. Daft-stubborn. If his lordship took a notion that children ought not to go down the mines, then you couldn’t argue him out of it.
Are those children to starve without work?
To give up the chance to learn the job beside their papas and uncles?
While the price of coal goes up because we’ve fewer people who know how to dig it? ”
Hammond, too, had arrived at some firmly held conclusions, or been led to them.
“Would you want your six-year-old son toiling in darkness at hard labor for twelve hours at a time, Hammond? To start that life before the boy has learned his letters, his Book of Common Prayer, or even enough ciphering to grasp what his wages should be? Would you be content to deprive him of all education and much of his health—he’ll nearly starve on the pittance he earns—so the mine owner can have a bigger mansion in Mayfair? ”
Hammond’s genial countenance registered confusion. “I’ve been getting above m’self. My besetting sin. Beg pardon, your lordship.”
He’d reached the limits of the local snug’s prevailing prejudices, in other words.
“None of that. Political debate is every Englishman’s right, and the ladies can be very spirited about it too.
Ask Miss Weatherby for her views on children in the mines.
She’ll make a much better job of the rebuttal than I can. ”
“Pippindonk says we’re a lot of nonsense, but he lets us go on unless it’s darts night. No debating polly-ticks on darts night. Even Fletcher abides by that rule.”
Fletcher? “Pippindonk runs a fine establishment.”
“Best inn in the whole of Little Middleton.” Hammond beamed at what was likely a local joke.
“And the best potatoes this side of heaven,” I added.
Hammond jaunted on his way, a bucket of ashes in one hand, somewhat shortsighted polly-ticks in the other.
Leaving me with more questions than ever: Assuming Fletcher Senior would not demean himself so far as to rub elbows with the Knot’s domestic staff, what was Alphonse Fletcher doing rousing the rabble this far from his own patch?
Had the young ladies of the vicarage played a role in Dantry’s disappearance?
I was whipping a fresh cravat into its customary mathematical when the more significant question occurred to me: Had all of those gardeners, grooms, and gamekeepers trundling up and down the lane between the Knot and Middleton seen nothing of the earl on the night he disappeared?
Had not one of them noticed a peer on his usual constitutional or deviating from that well-traveled route?
I pulled on my much-abused campaign boots and prepared to enlist the aid of my reinforcements. When a soldier went missing in action, time itself joined the list of his enemies, and Dantry had already been gone far too long.