Chapter Two #3
“You must be worried about him, if he has not been here since Monday,” Solomon said, looking about the tidy sitting room. “Is it like him to stay away like this?”
“Not this long,” Darren said, a faint frown of anxiety disturbing his brow. “He doesn’t always come home every night, though.”
“Do you know where he goes when he doesn’t come home?”
“Not my place to ask, sir,” Darren said woodenly.
“Which doesn’t quite answer the question,” Solomon pointed out. “According to Mr. Harvey, you last saw his son on Monday, when he went out. How was Mr. Percival dressed?”
Darren blinked. “As befits a gentleman,” he said with a hint of condescension.
“In morning attire?”
“Of course.”
“Was he carrying anything with him?”
“Such as what?”
“Such as a walking stick or an umbrella? Perhaps a small portmanteau?”
Darren blinked. “Portmanteau?”
“He attended a formal party on Tuesday evening, at the house of a Mrs. Vennor. I very much doubt that a gentleman would show himself at such a gathering wearing the morning clothes he’d dressed in the day before.”
A dull flush rose into Darren’s face. “He came home Tuesday afternoon, slept, bathed, and changed into evening attire.”
“So why keep this from Mr. Harvey?”
Darren shifted his weight to his other foot, then back again. “Because of the state he was in,” he muttered. “I panicked and just pretended Tuesday never happened.”
Solomon caught and held the man’s gaze, keeping his own severe in the way that had conquered cheeky clerks, predatory merchants, and rebellious workers on three continents. “It’s beyond schoolboy honor, Darren. This could be a matter of life and death. What state was Percy in on Tuesday afternoon?”
Darren slid his gaze free. “Drunk as a wheelbarrow, if you must know. Mud all over his coat and his trousers, as if he’d fallen over more than once. He stank.”
“Of what? Brandy? Tobacco?”
“That was the least of it,” Darren said with a flare of the nostrils. “He was still drunk. I had to put him to bed. Then he wakes up a few hours later, yells for his morning-after cure and a bath, and off he goes out to do it all again.”
“Only in evening dress, this time?”
“Exactly. Leaving me to change his bed.”
“Then when he came home on Tuesday afternoon, he was still in the same clothes as on Monday morning?”
“Apparently, though I had to clean them to be sure.”
So Percy hadn’t been anywhere on Monday night where evening dress was required or expected. He had kept low company, perhaps. “Did he come home on Tuesday night?”
“Yes,” Darren admitted. “Well, early Wednesday morning, I heard him blunder in. He went out again around midday. I couldn’t tell Mr. Harvey that, though, could I? Not when I’d already told him I hadn’t seen Mr. Percy since Monday.”
“He might have worried less if you’d told the truth. So when was the actual last time you saw your master?”
“Midday on Wednesday,” Darren muttered.
“Do you know where he was going?”
“White’s, I think.”
“But you were concerned enough on Thursday morning to write to Mr. Harvey to see if Percy had gone home to Channing?”
“Well…he hadn’t seemed himself on Wednesday. He worried me.”
“In what way?”
“He didn’t swear at me, which he usually does when he’s got a thick head. He seemed sort of distracted, dazed even.”
“Ill?” Solomon asked, frowning.
Darren shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. Worried, maybe. Or planning something. I don’t know.”
“He never confided in you?”
Darren’s smile was twisted. “I’m his servant, not his friend. I might gossip with the other menials.”
Solomon let that go. “Has anyone else come here looking for him?”
Darren hesitated but then seemed to shrug off the last remains of his instinctive discretion. “Some unsavory character came on Thursday morning. Vulgar, flash, wanted to come in and wait for Mr. Percy.”
“Did you let him?”
“No, I shut the door in his face and locked it. I thought for a moment he was going to break it open, but he just thumped it once, swore, and trundled off.”
“And that was when you wrote to Mr. Harvey?”
Darren nodded.
“Someone he owed money to, do you think?”
“Possibly. He didn’t leave a message.”
Ignoring the sarcasm, Solomon said, “Did anyone else visit during this week? Either with Percy or looking for him?”
“No, sir.”
“No women?” Solomon said bluntly.
“No, sir. He’s not stupid enough to bring such creatures here.”
“Not even more respectable women?”
“They wouldn’t be respectable, would they? Not if they were seen coming in or out of a gentleman’s rooms.”
“Fair point. What about a Mrs. Adelaide Jenkins?”
“She’s a neighbor in Channing.”
“Do you not go to Channing with your master when he visits?”
“Sometimes. Didn’t last time, because he didn’t plan to stay there for long. He was only away a few days.”
“I see. I had the impression he had followed Mrs. Jenkins to London.”
“He might have, for all I know.”
“Then you weren’t aware she was in London?”
“No reason I should be.”
Solomon held his gaze a moment longer. “Do you have any—any—idea where your master might be?”
Darren grimaced. “Between you and me, and not for Mr. Harvey’s ears—probably with some whore he picked up in the stews of St Giles.”