Chapter 15 #2
“Should we consult Miss Weatherby?” Hyperia murmured. “She probably knows Dantry better than he knows himself.”
“That’s my impression as well. She is certainly his muse. If he gives her half a chance, she will goad and inspire him to true heroics and to cease merely tilting at rhetorical windmills. She exhorted him, in essence, to put down his pen and do something.”
“Do something like what?”
Hyperia’s question blew a gust of mental clarity at the fog obscuring my half-formed notion. I beheld my beloved, who was plain by Society’s standards and a goddess in my eyes. She earnestly believed that I was the kindest, most honorable man in the world.
“Perry, the poor devils are in love.”
“One suspected as much. Why is this significant now?”
“You know I love you.”
She slanted a puzzled look at me. “Yes, and I love you, and we are in love, and betrothed, and it’s all very wonderful most of the time, but what has that to do with a missing earl?”
“He is mad for her, top over tail, which is why he’s been spending more time at the Knot lately.
He feels undeserving of her esteem. She feels undeserving of his.
They are fools in love, but he is a determined fool.
He is doing the hardest thing she has asked of him, retreating from mere words and espousing his values with actions. ”
I had the why. The oldest, most noble and ephemeral why known to humanity.
“What hardest thing, Jules?”
“He has admitted himself to the local madhouse, where his mother very likely spent her last days. He took on the causes of the mill workers and miners. He’s keen to rid London of the scourge of gin.
He opposed enclosures, especially in his own backyard, but he has yet to aim his legislative lance at madhouses or prisons. ”
“We haven’t a prison handy. Ergo…”
We rose as one.
“You’d best fetch him home, Julian. He’s taken this business a bit too far. That’s like him, isn’t it?”
“I suspect he is being held against his will, Perry. That he thought he was being admitted as a parliamentary visitor, an observer like those Quaker ladies who spend a night in women’s prisons and publish their experiences.
Now, for all intents and purposes, he’s locked away like an aging uncle with an intractable drinking problem. ”
“Or like an insane wife?”
“A prisoner by any other name, Perry. And just as soon as Fletcher gets his enclosure act approved, Dantry will be allowed to stumble home, and nobody will believe his tale.”
“I wouldn’t. An earl being shut away in an asylum that he willingly entered? A farfetched tale, at best.”
But an effective scheme indeed. “He won’t dare tell his tale, lest he be thought as daft as his late mother.
Society has a long and cruel memory. In fact, Dantry might cease his campaigns on all fronts lest he find himself again enjoying the dubious hospitality of Bascomb’s Retreat or facing gossip about his first stay. ”
Hyperia worried a nail. “What are you thinking, Julian? You have that captivated-by-an-outlandish-thought look.”
“I am thinking that if we pound on Fletcher’s door and accuse him of kidnapping a peer, or false imprisonment of a peer, the peer will well and truly vanish. We need to spring the captive free and then lay charges.”
“How do we do that? I am fairly nimble climbing drainpipes, provided I am wearing breeches.”
When did she have occasion to exercise that wonderfully dubious skill? “No need to don your breeches just yet. As it happens, a member of a local titled family is in need of a very discreet respite.”
“He… is?” She hugged me close. “Oh, Jules. Perhaps you were right that the sleuthing had best be put aside.”
“Even if I was right, you were more right, and we can’t put aside anything until Dantry is a free man.”
“Blast and perdition. How do we do this?”
We discussed particulars while I held an uncomfortable thought at bay.
Visiting the scene of his mother’s last days was undoubtedly difficult for Dantry.
What a pestilential coincidence, that subjecting myself to anything approximating incarceration would demand of me more courage and determination than I could at present lay claim to.
Fortunately for me, Hyperia West was willing to climb drainpipes, move mountains, and shout down the heavens to keep me safe.
“Her Grace won’t like this,” Hyperia said. “I don’t like it.”
“I positively loathe the whole notion, but we cannot leave Dantry to the dubious mercy of his captors, can we?”
“Certainly not.” And thus, the game was afoot.
Getting into Bascomb’s Retreat was appallingly easy.
“Open those gates, if you please,” John Coachman called from atop the box of the Waltham traveling coach.
A tall figure shuffled out of the gatehouse. “Ain’t expectin’ no deliveries when decent folk should be abed. Come back in the morning.” Even by moonlight, the fellow had a shabby, unkempt appearance and far more muscle than the average aging gatekeeper.
“Her Grace of Waltham is expected,” the coachy bellowed. “I refuse to keep this team standing about in the bitter cold because you are too far gone with drink to recollect your duties.”
The gatekeeper appeared to notice the crests on the coach for the first time. “You got a duchess in there?”
My mother made a sound like a suppressed snicker. “Sorry. Nerves.”
“The Duchess of Waltham has business to conduct at the Retreat and will be leaving shortly thereafter, so you’d best keep the gates unlocked.”
“Can’t do that.”
“Then remain awake long enough to facilitate our exit, or it will go hard for you.”
“When did your coachman acquire such thespian skills?” Sir Clive murmured.
The gatekeeper used a heavy key to unlock the gates and dragged them open. “Drive around back. We can’t have no scenes involving reluctant guests at the front door, if you take my meaning.”
“Walk on!”
The half-timbered Retreat gleamed against its dark pine background like bleached bones. How had I ever thought the place peaceful?
“If you are not out by morning,” Sir Clive said, “I will be on this drive with my blunderbuss, and Her Grace will be at my back with spare ammunition.”
“Don’t sign anything,” I said. “Don’t put your names or mine to any documents whatsoever.” I kept the fear from my words, but not the anxiety. “You drop me on the doorstep and wash your figurative hands of me.”
“We will appear to do exactly that, Julian,” Her Grace said. “Your orders were very clear.”
“See that you follow orders as well,” Sir Clive said. “Find Dantry. In the alternative, find evidence that he’s been there and then disappear into the woods. No heroics.”
No leaving camp without orders to follow a brother who’d been acting very oddly for some time. No surrendering to an unexpected French patrol just because my brother had done the same right before my disbelieving eyes.
“Julian?” The duchess sounded not worried, but impatient. “The plan is simple and safe. You are on reconnaissance, and you excel at reconnaissance. You spend the night, you change your mind in the morning, you walk out. You are Lord Julian Caldicott, and I have no legal authority to commit you.”
“Right.” This scheme had seemed sound enough when we’d hatched it up in the Dovecote library.
But then, taking on Wellington’s army at Waterloo had struck the French as a fine plan, until torrential rains had doomed their cavalry to death and exhaustion and their artillery to hopeless ineffectiveness.
“How odd,” Sir Clive said. “The front of the house is as dark as the pit. Around back, we have torches flaming brightly.”
Around back, the light was out of view of the road or any neighboring estate, thanks to the dense pines.
I identified the queasiness in my gut as battle nerves. A dry mouth, a sense of detachment, all to be expected, and yet… I hadn’t expected the symptoms to return with such intensity.
“We don’t have to do this,” the duchess said as the coach slowed. “We can roll right back out through the gates and take another approach, Julian.”
“We don’t have time. Fletcher has already become suspicious of my return to the vicinity. Sheldon might well try to warn him, and Dantry has been in there too long already.” If he was still being imprisoned at the Retreat.
“Be back at the Dovecote by morning, my lord, or I will know the reason why.” Her Grace startled me witless by leaning forward from the bench and seizing me in a swift hug. “Miss West and Miss Weatherby will expect a full report.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I love you. I lavished the words on Hyperia, but I could not recall the last time I’d said them to my mother.
Before I could fumble my way to some dignified approximation of honest sentiments, Sir Clive climbed out and assisted the duchess to alight. I followed, affecting an air of boredom.
The stables were surprisingly close to the back of the house, as was a kennel—an occupied kennel, based on the scents perfuming the night air.
Not a hundred feet from the drive sat a smallish barn with paddocks stretching to the east along the tree line.
A dim light showed from within, suggesting a groom on duty after dark.
Why?
A carriage house was situated along the trees to the east, and another dim light shone therein. The grooms’ quarters, presumably the second floor above the carriage house, were dark.
The simplest explanation for activity in the stable and carriage house was that somebody planned to travel as soon as the moon rose a bit higher.
“What is it?” the duchess asked as Sir Clive used a stout knocker to rap on the back door.
“Nothing of any moment. Mama…”
She took my arm. “You will be careful, won’t you?”
“Extraordinarily so.”
She nodded briskly and assumed the air of Mrs. Siddons awaiting her third-act cue. I mentally recited the Pater Noster in Latin and reviewed my orders. Get in, find Dantry or evidence of his presence, get out by morning.
Those were my orders, but as I had on so many occasions in Spain, I planned to modify them substantially if necessary. My arrival at the Retreat would surely be brought to Fletcher’s notice before he’d finished his first cup of morning tea.
I had to learn Dantry’s whereabouts by morning, or locate the earl in the Retreat itself, and get him out with me.
The door opened, and a liveried footman appeared. He and Sir Clive undertook some discussion. I caught the words ruddy duchess, and be it on your head, and formidable.
Sir Clive eventually motioned for Her Grace and me to come forward. As we ascended the steps, I could see into the dimly lit stable just enough to make out a gray horse secured in the crossties.
Not golden, gray. And the beast was standing with one hip cocked at a steep angle, its dingy tail hanging slightly aside, as if the horse were resting a sore joint.
“Your Grace.” The footman bowed. “Gentlemen. Mrs. Blumenthal will be with you shortly. We were not expecting any arrivals this evening.”
I had graduated from a delivery to an arrival. Progress, of a sort.
The duchess sniffed regally when we’d been shown to a small, tidy parlor. “Please inform this Mrs. Blumenthal that her laxity will be noted.”
I did not sniff. Despite the parlor’s pleasant appointments—chintz sofa and chairs, floral still lifes in oil, and freshly swept hearth, I detected the faint aromas of lye and tallow. Neither scent was appealing.
An awkward two minutes later, a sizable woman in black bombazine joined us. She wore a gold cross on a chain about her neck and had covered her hair with a lacy white cap. I would have bet my flask she was no sort of sister of mercy.