Chapter 12 #3
A chubby housekeeper informed me that Mr. Deemster and his sister were out making calls.
I left a card and turned my horse back in the direction of the Dovecote.
A sister well enough to go calling on a winter morning was a sister well on the road to recovery, if she’d ever been ailing in the first place.
I was somewhat comforted by the fact that the butler was where he’d said he’d be, but also puzzled that he was making excuses for abandoning his post. My musings were interrupted by the clip-clop of hooves on soft ground coming up behind me.
“Morning, sir,” called a hearty male voice.
The rider slowed from the trot to the walk as he passed me, a courtesy, given the sloppy, muddy footing.
The horse was golden with a cream mane and tail. Not chestnut or white, but the color in between that I had seen previously mostly on the Peninsula.
“Mr. Alphonse Fletcher?”
He kept his horse beside mine. “I have that modest honor. You must be Lord Julian Caldicott. One heard you were in the neighborhood, escorting your mama on a visit to the Dovecote. Fletcher, at your service.” He touched a finger to his hat brim.
“I was hoping to cross paths with you, as it happens.” The golden horse was lovely, Fletcher’s equitation…
not so much. He hunched forward slightly, which weighted the horse’s forehand and thus made the beast’s job harder.
Fletcher’s build was burly through the chest and shoulders, compounding the imbalance.
“Why would a man of your lordship’s august provenance be looking for my humble self?” His grin was anything but humble.
“Because Lord Dantry has gone missing, and you’ve been seen frequenting The Jolly Weasel. Dantry was last seen in those surrounds. Might you know anything about his disappearance?”
Fletcher adjusted his reins. “Disappearance? He’s not in Town, preparing to shout down anybody seeking to propose sensible legislation?”
“I am confident that he is not in London.” Unless he’d walked there or sprouted wings and flown.
“Somebody has put him on a packet for France, then, or Scotland. He’s not very popular among his peers, you know, and I can’t say I’m disappointed that he’s been sent to Coventry.”
“He’s not taking a repairing lease in Bath?”
Fletcher shook his head. “Not Dantry. He’s a true believer. He is wrongheaded, a traitor to the aristocracy, and intemperate in his tactics, but he would not miss the opening of Parliament for all the brandy in France.”
Fletcher’s appearance was that of a young, jolly squire. Flaxen-haired, rubicund, and genial, though the gaze he swept over me was shrewd.
“Will you be going up to Town soon, Fletcher?” He was an MP, after all.
“Of course. We’ve much to do in the lower house if we’re to keep you lot from beggaring the nation worse than you already have.”
Rudeness would not distract me from noticing that my line of questions made Fletcher uneasy.
“What draws you to Sir Clive’s backyard, Fletcher?”
He fussed with his horse’s mane. “Uncle said you were pointing fingers.”
“Sir Clive fears that Lord Dantry overimbibed some of the local brew and stumbled into a ditch, where the elements put an end to him. For Sir Clive, given the unfortunate demise of his young son, Dantry’s absence is particularly painful.
I am trying to find answers, Fletcher, which is a very different undertaking from blustering, pointing fingers, and starting snide talk behind a man’s back. ”
Fletcher’s raised eyebrows suggested he knew he’d been served a rudeness for a rudeness.
“Now, see here, Caldicott. I have no personal antipathy to Lord Dantry—unlike my uncle, who can’t stand the man—but Dantry makes it too easy to ridicule him.
He’s impractical, unfocused, and too damned long-winded by half, but I did not cosh him over the head and drag his lifeless body into some coalpit. ”
“Good to know. Why have you been patronizing the Weasel?”
“The usual reason.” His ears colored a shade of vermillion associated with schoolboys who lied badly.
“Ma Pippindonk’s potatoes?”
“What? No, though they are a meal I have enjoyed. I was enamored of an unsuitable parti in the neighborhood and making my calls after dark, when I was less likely to be seen pining at her window, so to speak.”
Oh, right, and then the lovelorn suitor stopped at the local posting inn and trumpeted his politics where all and sundry would be unable to ignore his presence.
“I won’t be lifting my glass at the Weasel much in future,” Fletcher went on. “My duties lie in London, and the young lady and I have called it quits.”
How fortunate for the young lady.
“Would your uncle be so wroth with Lord Dantry that he would arrange for his lordship to be shipped from the country?” I stopped short of suggesting outright murder.
James Fletcher struck me as lacking the ruthlessness required to take a life.
He was soft, in other words. His greed was limited by his fear of reprisals.
“To what purpose would Uncle have Dantry kidnapped? Dantry does more for the Tory cause as a bad example of bleeding-heart radicalism than I could ever do with my soundly reasoned speeches or my occasional harmless jests meant all in good fun. The man wants to tax rum, gin, and tobacco, for pity’s sake.
That notion is tantamount to instigating riots in every port.
Ask Sheldon what’s afoot with his brother. You might be surprised at the answer.”
I had asked Sheldon. His reply had been far from surprising. “Sheldon is facing a seven-year wait before he can even begin to try to have Dantry declared dead, and in those seven years, the Dovecote’s finances will be all but paralyzed.”
“Uncle would love that. He’s been coveting a certain patch of forest that abuts our orchards, and if Sheldon is short of cash—which he frequently professes to be—those woods are as good as ours.”
I wanted to knock this disrespectful, selfish, arrogant excuse for a public servant from his golden horse.
“How easily will you be reelected, Fletcher, if it’s known that you were flitting about Little Middleton on the night Dantry went missing? You were seen, make no mistake. Your horse gives you away, as does your unfortunate tendency to hunch forward in the saddle.”
Confusion colored the scowl he turned on me, though he did sit up straight. “I had nothing to do with this, Caldicott, and if you so much as hint, much less imply, otherwise I will see you sued for slander.”
“I suspected you weren’t the kind to be seen on the field of honor when affronted.
Ah, well. I will confine myself to making jests in poor taste, then, of the kind you assure me are all in harmless good fun.
My regards to your uncle.” I touched my hat brim and cued Sir Clive’s steed to canter on, which he did, not a hint of stiffness to his gait.