Chapter Twelve
“Healy West says you were asking about a fellow named Waites,” Second Lieutenant Palmer said. “Served in India, died of a fever.”
Palmer was that ageless article, the career soldier of middling rank. Because he’d been billeted to Horse Guards, rather than sent home on half pay, I put his age past forty, but he might well be closer to thirty or fifty. Years in India took a toll on English complexions, as did years in Spain.
Palmer was paying that toll plus interest. His blue eyes were especially vivid against the weathered parchment of his skin, and his hair wasn’t graying so much as the sun had leached away what little color he’d been born with.
He was tallish, though his posture was slightly crooked.
“I’m inquiring about a Lieutenant Waites and his wife.” I had not been invited to sit, but then, every chair in the cramped room was full of file boxes and stacks of loose papers. Palmer occupied a desk that struck me as too low for a man of his height.
“Let’s walk,” he said, abandoning his chair. “My hip does better if I don’t sit for too long.”
The last thing I wanted to do—the very, very last thing—was patrol the corridors of Horse Guards during business hours.
During any hours.
Though Palmer, for his part, probably didn’t want to be seen ambling along the street with me, which left the worst option—the vast, level parade ground, where the sun would be painfully bright, and I would be on display from every compass point.
“You served with Waites?” I asked as we set off down the hot, dim corridor.
“If you can call it that. We were largely idle, until some prince or other decided he’d rather not have Britain tell him what to do.” Palmer set a limping pace, and when we reached the end of the hallway, he executed a lopsided about-face and started back the way we’d come. “Waites didn’t last long. Never saw combat.”
“Do you recall anything of his wife?”
“Won’t forget that one. Martha. Army life is hard on the wives. Some of the officers in India prefer the local culture. Most of them took local wives or mistresses. The British wives were supposed to tolerate that without actually accepting it. Mrs. Waites wasn’t high in the instep, if you know what I mean.”
We rounded a corner, and I was abruptly faced with one of the myriad men whose path had crossed mine in Spain. Captain… No, not captain. Ensign. I rummaged around in my memory. A short name, one of those trade names. Cooper, Smith, Harper… He was blond, going from solid to paunchy, and still sporting a mustache about which he’d been inordinately vain.
While my mind had known I was likely to encounter such men here of all places, the reality was unnerving. My legs wanted to run, my belly wanted to heave, and a clammy sweat trickled down my back.
Surprise in the ensign’s eyes turned to shock, then disgust.
Draper , that was it. Ensign Hugh Draper. His nicknames had alluded to a proclivity for disrespecting women. He’d apparently come up in the world despite that failing, and he’d finally made lieutenant.
“Who let you in?” Draper sneered.
“I did,” Palmer replied. “You have a problem with me, Draper?”
“I have a problem with him .”
That was my cue to shove Draper in the gut, slap a glove across his jowls, or otherwise take the rancid bait his insult offered. He personally had no quarrel with me. We’d not even been in the same regiment. He’d been artillery. I’d been infantry or occasionally cavalry.
He wasn’t worth my life, and I wasn’t about to become a murderer for the sake of his vanity.
“This man,” Palmer said evenly, “told my colonel that to send our sharpshooters through the mountains to establish camp ahead of the artillery and infantry would be rank foolishness. My colonel listened to him, and everybody got to camp safely, including both of my brothers. Colonel Blanton hated to have his plans questioned and loathed taking the slower route through the valleys. Others were not so fortunate as to heed Caldicott’s intelligence on that same campaign, and they aren’t here to complain about it.”
I had all but forgotten that argument with Blanton. I’d been exhausted past any regard for protocol, manners, or etiquette. Blanton, looking at a map, had decreed that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line. Artillery might not be able to travel that straight line, but elite British riflemen for damned sure could, and then secure the destination that much faster.
The colonel had never attempted to explain straight lines to a mountain that topped eight thousand feet. He’d never tried to make summer uniforms and rations suffice at that elevation, where little vegetation grew, and less water—other than snow on the north-facing slopes—was to be found, but bandits abounded.
He’d listened, though. That time, my shouting and swearing hadn’t been in vain.
Draper’s parting shot was to treat me to one more silent, disdainful perusal, then to proceed past us, chin up as if on business for Wellington himself.
“Pity we couldn’t tell the French where to aim,” Palmer said mildly. “What did you want to know about Mrs. Waites?”
We resumed walking, or limping in Palmer’s case.
“Any detail you can recall. Where was she from? Did she ever mention a maiden name? A village back home? A cousin or sister in London?”
“She was lively,” Palmer said. “The other ladies couldn’t abide that, a woman who managed to be happy in the heathen climate. A woman who was glad to be away from English winters and the stink of coal. I had the sense Mrs. Waites wasn’t from London, but she’d spent enough time in the Great Smoke to want to be quit of it.”
“One of the many who come to Town looking for work and find only misery and dirt?”
“Not that bad, but a land-on-her-feet type. She would have made a good soldier.”
We executed another about-face and were again heading back to Palmer’s office. “Is it possible she was ill, Palmer? A consumptive who found relief in a warmer climate?”
He stumped onward for several yards. “Yes, now that you mention it. She had the complexion—the pale complexion and the pink cheeks. Redheads sometimes do, but in hindsight… She would occasionally take a poor turn when the weather changed. She didn’t want to go back to England, I know that, but Danforth was adamant that she not marry one of the other junior officers, to the disappointment of every fellow at the fort.”
“Danforth?”
“Lieutenant colonel. I didn’t serve under him, but his lookout included what to do with widows.”
His lookout, or his lady wife’s? “Do you know anybody who did serve under Danforth?”
Palmer paused outside his cramped, stuffy office. “Bennet’s still around. I see him occasionally on the parade ground at the beginning or end of the day. He’d recall Danforth.”
“Chat him up, please. General impressions of Mrs. Waites, incidents of note, that sort of thing.” I gave Palmer my direction, and because he had not asked, I also acquainted him with the larger parameters of my mission—an orphaned boy, questionable antecedents, Mrs. Waites’s claims, and my brother’s confusing legacy.
“Damned war,” Palmer said. “The shooting ends. The battles and misery go on.”
I thought of his unexpected defense of me and of Draper’s retreat. “The battles and misery don’t go on forever, at least not the part we can blame on war.”
He lowered himself carefully to his chair. “True enough. Another six months, and I can retire. I’m grateful for my post, but I will be more grateful to see the last of it. Best of luck, milord.”
“Same to you.”
I made my escape by virtue of a dingy set of backstairs and emerged into the brutally sunny expanse of the parade ground. The space was level, wide open, and graveled, about as far from the uneven terrain, poor visibility, and stink of a battlefield as a site for military maneuvers could get.
A former tiltyard, where Henry VIII had staged violence for his royal entertainment.
I hurried on my way, though I spared a thought for Martha Waites. She’d been ill even in India—consumption could take forever to kill its victims—and Mrs. Danforth had condemned her to return to London’s cold and coal smoke. Martha’s great offenses had been a blithe spirit and a pretty face.
She’d turned in her extremity to the very person who’d doubtless condemned her to a shorter life endured in London’s foul air. Perhaps she thought Mrs. Danforth owed her, or perhaps she wanted her nemesis to witness her death.
Not all battlefields were characterized by cannon and cavalry, and some heinous blackguards wielded jasperware instead of pistols.
The women at the Swan recalled only generalities.
Every three months for about two-and-a-half years running, a young lady had arrived to retrieve a parcel from the “hold for receipt” correspondence entrusted to the innkeeper. She came alone, and she came within a week of the parcel’s delivery.
One day, the lady had arrived to collect the quarterly epistle, but no epistle had awaited her.
The timing coincided loosely with Harry’s death, and the description of the parcel’s recipient was vague. Youngish, though not a girl. Trim, rather than skinny. Decently clothed, no widow’s weeds, no fancy veils or attempts to disguise her identity. Tallish, but not a maypole. The innkeeper’s niece recalled the woman as fair, but she’d worn bonnets, and thus hair color had not been noted.
Mrs. Waites, Helvetica Siegurdson, and Clarissa fit the description, though for all I knew, so did Lady Clarissa’s lady’s maid or any number of Mrs. Bellassai’s employees.
Clothilda Hammerschmidt, while short, could have enlisted Martha Waites to collect the funds for her.
I climbed into my curricle and took the reins from Atticus. “No progress. In three years, the trail has gone cold. The ladies wanted to help but had little to offer by way of details.”
Beecham was in the traces, and that good fellow was content to continue dozing until I gave him the office to walk on.
“Years are a long time in London.” Atticus shifted back to his perch behind the bench. “In the country, nothing happens, and folk sit around recalling everything forever. When the dog had twelve puppies and they all lived. When somebody’s cousin ran off with the squinty-eyed curate twenty years past. London… It’s different here. Too busy. No time to sit and recall anything.”
In London, Atticus was apparently paying a bit more attention to his diction—at times.
“Wentworth came around the Swan after the last packet was delivered. He left a parcel and directions that he was to be notified if anybody retrieved it, but nobody ever did.” By the time he’d taken a hand in matters, the recipient, whoever she was, had either given up or left Town.
“And the ladies remembered that?”
“He makes an impression.” And Harry’s banker had apparently come in person rather than send an underling, such was his commitment to discretion where his clients were concerned.
“We just going to sit here?”
Afternoon was shifting into early evening. I’d tarried at the ducal residence long enough to dispatch one of Arthur’s countless clerks to Doctors’ Commons. If Harry had married anybody while on leave, he’d had a narrow window of weeks in which to do it. I’d been consigned to the quartermaster’s ranks on occasion, though I did not speak fluent clerk, nor did I aspire to. A ducal clerk would deal more effectively with his counterparts at Doctors’ Commons.
A special license would have been far more discreet than crying banns, and that little entry in Harry’s public ledger—￡5 DC—bothered me.
At this point in my day, everything bothered me. I was tired, hot, frustrated, and about to embark on what could be described as a kidnapping—a consensual kidnapping, I hoped.
“You take the reins,” I said, shifting on the bench. “Go slowly. The streets grow busier at this hour, and the route will be unfamiliar to both you and Beecham.”
“Where we going?”
“Mrs. Danforth’s.”
To my surprise, Atticus knew the way. He’d studied maps of London in his free time and committed the terrain to memory. While he did not know the names of all the streets—his literacy was in its infancy—he had an accurate grasp of how those streets fit together.
We pulled up into the mews behind Mrs. Danforth’s home, and the shade of the alley was a benediction.
“Beecham will need water,” I said, climbing down and passing Atticus my flask. “I need to find you a flask too.”
He drank liberally and handed the flask back. “S’pose everybody’s down at the pub?”
Summer evenings went on forever in Merry Olde, and yet, we’d reached the hour when somebody ought to have been making a last pass with the muck wagon, refilling water buckets, and pitching the evening’s portion of hay. Only then would the grooms be free to enjoy their final pint of the day.
The alley in general and the mews in particular were deserted.
“See to the horse.” Arthur’s itchy feeling was familiar to me. A nagging sense of something amiss, something out of place. French snipers lurking in the undergrowth weren’t a strong possibility, but they’d given me the same wary, unsettled sensation.
I had a look around the stable.
“They ain’t done late chores yet,” Atticus said, collecting an empty bucket and filling it at the pump. “Nobody’s mucked out. Horses don’t have no hay.”
He was worried, too, as indicated by the deterioration in his syntax.
The little valise yet occupied its shadowed corner. I took a moment to examine the contents and found clothing for a boy, most of it appearing to be newly made. Linen shirts with exquisitely stitched seams. As I knelt in the shadows, I sorted through miniature knitted stockings tidily rolled up. A handsome little Sunday jacket in burgundy velvet. Two pair of trousers, one in linen, the other wool, both of a sensible brown and both having substantial hems. At the bottom of the valise, I found three handkerchiefs. Two everyday of white linen and one—silk—heavily embroidered and bearing the monogram HCM.
Harold Merton Caldicott, with the central C larger than the two flanking letters. The stitchery was elaborate, including griffins in the three corners not taken up with initials. Effusions of vines, roses, and leaves filled the borders. Gold thread among the blue, red, and green gave the whole a luminous quality.
Such an article was fit for brandishing at a fellow’s court presentation. I held the linen to my nose and caught nothing but camphor in the scent, though a hint of Harry’s preferred cedar shaving soap would not have surprised me.
“Mighty fancy,” Atticus said, peering over my shoulder. “Too bad about the initials, or it would fetch a pretty penny on Rosemary Lane.”
“This might well be the boy’s sole inheritance from his father. Somebody had sense enough not to sell it.”
Mrs. Waites, perhaps. Miss Hammerschmidt would have long since pawned such an item to cover her tab at the nearest gin palace. Miss Dujardin was clearly the guardian of Leander’s legacy now, though why hadn’t she mentioned this item to me earlier?
“What’s with all the lions?” Atticus asked.
“Those are griffins. A cross between a lion and an eagle. We’ve discussed them before, and they relate to the Caldicott family crest. Give Beecham his water, please.”
Atticus watched while I replaced the contents of the valise. “Somebody had some new duds.”
Atticus well knew to whom the clothing likely belonged. “See to the horse.”
He picked up his bucket and bustled off while I set the valise back in its corner and took another look around. A stable, like a garden or pantry, often had stories to tell to the observant. Something was amiss, or perhaps Mrs. Danforth’s staff was in the habit of deserting their posts.
On a hook behind some horse blankets, I found a cloak tied up into a bundle such as shepherds, drovers, and other humble travelers fashioned. I thrust a hand between folds of fabric and extracted a little tin of lemon soap. Hard edges suggested I’d find Miss Dujardin’s few books, along with her hand mirror and comb.
Like a good soldier, Miss Dujardin had been ready to break camp on a moment’s notice.
I replaced the bundle and crossed to the garden gate. “Atticus, don’t wander off. We might need to leave in a hurry.” A general caution. I had no reason to suspect disorderly retreat would be required, but no reason to trust Mrs. Danforth’s continued hospitality either.
The funds Wentworth had been holding, if they were known to Leander’s mother or those posing as his mother, made the child a financial prize. Arthur and I were not legally compelled to use that money for the boy, but the implications were enough to provide grounds for a lawsuit, with all the endless scandal and expense that would entail.
I had a quick look around the garden—deserted—and decided to eschew the front door. I took myself down the steps to the kitchen, and all the quiet of the stable and garden was replaced with uproar and pandemonium.
“Be ye a robber?” a half-grown girl asked. Her cap was askew, and a damp semicircle of dubious hue discolored her apron. “We ain’t got nuffink worth stealin’, unless you count Cook’s buns.”
Cook, a robust woman of middle years, ceased chopping scrubbed potatoes, while a maid of some sort wept into an apron. A young fellow who might have passed for a footman tried to console her.
“We didn’t hear the bell,” Cook said. “House is at sixes and seven. Who be ye, sir?”
“Lord Julian Caldicott, come to call on Master Leander. Your stable lads were not in evidence, and I gather there’s been some sort of general upset.”
“They took ’im!” the lachrymose maid expostulated. “The sweeps got ’im, I tell you. The lad’s little and quick and strong. The sweeps stole ’im.”
The footman patted her shoulder ineffectually while the sobs grew louder. Another fellow, older and clad in the sort of rough garb I associated with a man-of-all-work came down the steps that led to the garden.
“No luck so far,” he said, “but the lads will want some supper. We’ve searched the nearest squares and asked at every kitchen door on the street. Who’s he?”
The itchy feeling coalesced into pure, black dread. “Lord Julian Caldicott, at your service. I take it Master Leander is missing?”
“The sweeps got ’im or the coalman,” the maid wailed. “Little boys go down the mines and never come up. Me cousin says it ’appens all the time. The Navy will steal a lad for midshipman, and ’e were just a wee mite. Them molly ’ouses is forever snatching up sweet little lads, and Leander is ever so sweet.”
The Navy had ceased impressing even grown men, to the best of my knowledge. The threat of a French blockade had been eliminated, and the high seas were much safer than in years past.
The other listed threats were all too possible.
“Somebody take me to Mrs. Danforth, please.”
The older fellow glanced at the cook. This was her domain, and she was the appropriate authority to issue any orders.
“Bella, cease your caterwauling. Jones, take his lordship to see Missus, but button yer jacket afore you set foot abovestairs. Ask Missus if she’d like supper moved back, and tell her Griffith reports no luck.”
Jones offered Bella one more consoling stroke of his hand over her shoulder, then he buttoned his jacket and produced a set of gloves from a pocket.
“This way, sir, er, milord.” He began jogging up the steps, but slowed his pace as he neared the landing.
“New to service,” Cook said. “We always get ’em when they’re new to service.”
When their wages would be lowest. I followed Jones up the steps and was shown to the fussy parlor.
“Don’t bother with a tea tray,” I said. “You have more important things to worry about.”
“Sweeps haven’t been in the neighborhood, sir. Bella’s just a little nervous.”
“The sweeps would hardly go hunting in the same location where they’re working, would they? They’d leave their brushes and ladders at home and look far afield for their climbing boys.”
Leander was the perfect age to take up the profession, and the sweeps might get a good two years’ service from him. Sweeps typically begrudged their lads good tucker in an effort to keep them small and nimble as long as possible, but then, after a year or two, most of the boys were suffering from sooty warts, bad lungs, or worse.
“He’d run from the sweeps, sir. Miss Dujardin told him that if ever strange men tried to befriend him, he was to run and yell bloody murder all the while.”
“And if, instead, a friendly, pretty woman approached him and asked him to hold her dog for just a moment in exchange for shiny coin?”
Jones swallowed and glanced away to the west, probably the direction of his much-missed, and much less criminally inclined, home shire.
“Please fetch Mrs. Danforth,” I said, “and let Miss Dujardin know I’m on the premises.”
“She and Pansy are out looking with the rest of us, sir. Inquiring of the neighbors and asking Vicar to put the word out.”
Splendid. If the boy had been abducted, a general alarm would do more harm than good. Witnesses would leave their posts to join in the search, evidence would be disturbed, and accurate recollections would become harder to elicit.
“Then please fetch Mrs. Danforth and tell the other lads they’re to report their findings to Griffith, with whom I will confer in person. You, Griffith, and the rest of the staff are to take supper before we decide next steps.”
“Aye, sir. I mean, milord.” He reached up as if to tug at a cap, remembered to bow, and marched off.
Mrs. Danforth made me wait another five interminable minutes before presenting herself, and those five minutes entirely obliterated my patience.
“Well, he’s gone,” she said without offering me so much as a greeting. “Despite your dithering and lording about, you will no doubt blame me, and after all I’ve done for the boy. I barely knew his mother, and yet, I opened my home to her and her brat and even saw to her final arrangements. I am not so lacking in Christian charity that I’d—”
I advanced on her and came close enough to see the face powder that had caked in the creases around her mouth.
“When did you last see him?”
She took a step back. “I endeavor not to see him or hear him.”
“Believe me, ma’am, he prefers to avoid you as well. I don’t suppose you hit him again?”
She looked away.
“Did you?”
“Of course not.”
Maybe not, but she’d apparently come close or threatened the lad. “When did you last see him?”
“He was belowstairs again, on the back terrace, maybe an hour and a half ago. Dujardin was nowhere in sight. He claimed she was using the jakes, and I wasn’t about to investigate that allegation. Children lie all the time, boys especially, and then they grow up to be cheating, dishonest…”
“Enough.” The late Lieutenant Colonel Danforth had failed to earn his wife’s respect. That was hardly my problem, much less Leander’s. “Did you chase the boy back up the steps?”
“I indicated that returning abovestairs was in his best interests, then went off on my charitable calls.”
I detested bullies, and that thought alone preserved me from delivering to Mrs. Danforth such a lecture as would leave her fearing for her immortal soul, her reputation, and her safety in dark alleys.
“Get out of my sight, madam, and you’d best hope we recover the lad hale and whole, or I shall become the flaming arrow of justice that ignites the pyre of your social damnation. That is not a threat. That is my solemn oath.”
She sniffed and gave me her back, nearly colliding with Miss Dujardin at the door. They moved around each other, an odd little dance of mutual loathing that put me in mind of pugilists at the start of a match. Miss Dujardin had been crying, but her bonnet was tied in a tidy bow, and her gloves were spotless.
“My lord, you’ve come. You got my note, and now you’ve come. Please say you’ll find him.”
“I will move heaven, earth, and any available parts of hell in that very effort,” I said, bowing slightly. “What note?”
“I saw that woman lurking about, the seamstress who claimed to be Martha’s friend. She was loitering in the alley this morning, and then I saw her again by the pub when Leander and I went to the park this afternoon. She made me uneasy, and I thought… I sent you a note, and now you’re here.”
Bloody, bollocking hell.
“We’ll find him, and your sharp eyes mean the search just narrowed to manageable proportions.” I adopted a brisk tone and directed Miss Dujardin to be seated.
As we wasted precious minutes reviewing her recollection of the day’s events, I mentally inventoried who and what I knew of London’s theater community and where Clothilda Hammerschmidt could temporarily hide a small, very frightened boy. Atticus had followed Miss Hammerschmidt to a gin palace two streets from Covent Garden, which, unfortunately, narrowed the possibilities not one bit.