Chapter Thirteen
“We have a line of scent to follow,” I informed the ranks of Mrs. Danforth’s employees as they took their supper at the kitchen table. “Miss Dujardin has seen a certain personage of dubious intent in the vicinity of this house earlier today, a Miss Clothilda Hammerschmidt, a seamstress who works for the theaters.”
The teary maid, Bella, glowered at her tankard of ale. “She come around looking for dresses, she did. Most outlandish bonnet I ever did see and demanding what she ’ad no claim on, like the pope claiming the New World.”
“The very same woman,” I said. “We have reason to believe she means to hold Leander for ransom, and of all things, she claims to be his mother.”
“Baggage,” the cook muttered. “What sort of mother never comes around to see her lad when he’s bidin’ barely a half hour’s stroll from Drury Lane?”
“Excellent point,” I replied, “but I cannot at present refute her claim, and if Leander is illegitimate, she is his legal custodian.”
“She is not his mother,” Miss Dujardin said from a perch on the raised hearth. “Martha would have told me, and the only times I can recall Miss Hammerschmidt looking Martha up was when Miss Hammerschmidt was between jobs and without coin. She never took an interest in Leander.”
“Be that as it may, Miss Hammerschmidt and Lord Harry were occasionally seen together during his last winter in London. She will fabricate all manner of documents, eyewitnesses, and other proof. My intention is to simply appropriate Leander from her care.”
Miss Dujardin, still in bonnet and summer cloak, worried a nail. “Leander will become a shuttlecock.”
“Yonder lord’s brother is a duke,” the footman, Jones, observed while buttering a slice of bread. “Good luck winning a match in the courts against such as that.”
“That’s not the point,” Miss Dujardin snapped.
I had never heard her use such a sharp tone. Not on me, who’d occasionally vexed her sorely. Not on Leander.
“Miss Dujardin, I suspect you are in want of sustenance and certainly in want of something to drink. I am off to pay a call on an acquaintance who might know where Miss Hammerschmidt bides. Jones is right that my brother is a duke, and more to the point, I was a reconnaissance officer serving under Wellington. I will track Leander from St. Giles to purgatory to the ninth circle of hell if necessary to bring that child safely home.”
My audience did me the courtesy of allowing my stirring declaration to go unchallenged, but Leander did not, at present, even have a home. I collected my hat and walking stick and took the steps up to the garden. Evening was descending, and I shuddered to think where Leander might spend the night.
The child had not had an easy time of it. No father to speak of, his mother ill—if Martha Waites had been his mother—then gone from his life. Racketing from pillar to post, tossed on the cruel charity of the Danforth viper, and now this.
I sank onto a wooden bench, overcome not by fatigue of the body precisely, though I was tired, but by a sense of hopelessness. I had left the boy here, where he’d not been safe, even after Mrs. Danforth had taken out her wrath on him. She’d likely done that on purpose, striking the child because she could not vent her frustrations on me.
And then that nasty note. As sparrows flitted about in the maples along the alley, I wondered if Mrs. Danforth hadn’t summoned Miss Hammerschmidt in a fit of pique. Mrs. Danforth would not want the likes of Miss Hammerschmidt to darken even her back garden gate, but I’d already underestimated Mrs. Danforth’s ill nature once.
“Thank goodness you’re still here.” Miss Dujardin emerged at the top of the kitchen steps. “Cook said you should eat something. These meat pies are cold, but they are meat pies. Plenty of beef and made just this afternoon.”
She passed over a linen bundle. The poor woman still had not taken the time to remove her bonnet or cloak.
I rose and accepted the proffered bounty, feeling the day’s exertions in every joint and sinew. “Considerate of her and of you. I forgot to tell Griffith not to resume searching. We know now that Leander hasn’t wandered off.”
Miss Dujardin paced off a few steps, pivoted, and stalked back to me. “I thought Leander’s worst problem was avoiding Mrs. Danforth, then Bella started bleating about bordellos and coalmen. I have never been so frightened in all my life, and there’s nothing I can do. Might you post a reward?”
“I can.” Though a reward would bring all manner of false witnesses out of the sewers and hedges. A hue and cry would also do exactly what Arthur hoped to avoid, and create a tempest of talk just as he and Banter were trying for a prosaic departure for the Continent.
My sense of failure mounted, such that if I did find Clothilda Hammerschmidt in the warren of London’s feculent slums, she would deem me her worst nightmare incarnate. To extort coin from me or the Duke of Waltham was dirty tactics, but a venerable strategy in any war fought on the battleground of public opinion.
To involve the child she claimed was her son…
“She’s not his mother,” Miss Dujardin said again, resuming her pacing. “No sort of mother would treat her own offspring thus.”
“A desperate mother might.”
“Miss Hammerschmidt has work, you say, at the theaters. She’d have us believe her admirers once included a ducal heir. She had no need to do this.”
Those were sound arguments, and yet, I played devil’s advocate. “Perhaps that life has exhausted her capacity for human decency. People can be pushed too far.” Had Harry somehow been pushed too far? He’d certainly been involved in questionable undertakings while on leave in London.
Miss Dujardin cast herself onto the bench I’d vacated. “What excuse would you make for Mrs. Danforth, my lord? She has a roof over her head, some regular income. She can afford this house and a staff—a full, mostly idle staff—and yet, she begrudges a child his porridge. She’d have tossed poor Dasher to the ragman if Leander hadn’t insisted he either keep the horse in his very hands or hide it in my room.”
Despite the miasma of despair clouding my mood, my mind seized on the detail of the stuffed horse.
“Where is Dasher now?”
“Not in my room. I checked. Checking became a habit because I do not trust Mrs. Danforth to spare the child even a ratty old toy. She needed us gone, my lord. To use the language of my betters, Leander and I are not good ton. ”
I wanted to ponder the horse and the significance of its absence until the sun had set and the seasons had changed, but darkness could only aid Miss Hammerschmidt and give Leander one more thing to fear.
I took out my notebook and pencil and scribbled a few words in French. “Can you have Bella or Pansy deliver this to His Grace?” I passed over the note and, as an afterthought, wrote another. “That one is for Miss West, who dwells with her brother on Ainsley Lane. They will be as concerned for Leander as I am.”
I let out a whistle, which would signal Atticus to get Beecham ready to depart. A handful of oats, another offer of water… We had a long evening ahead of us.
Miss Dujardin rose and collected the second note. “I should have insisted you take in Leander a week ago. I will never forgive myself for putting deference to your station above his welfare.”
“You did not steal the boy, miss. You did everything in your power to keep him safe in enemy territory while I dithered over legalities and ancient history. If anybody is to flagellate himself with guilt, let it be me. I’m an old hand at it.”
Her smile was wan, but reminded me that Miss Dujardin—did I even know her Christian name?—was a pretty woman. Not in the overt, sensual, grande horizontale manner of a Mrs. Bellassai, but in a quieter, sweeter manner.
I very much wanted to pay my call on Alexander Newton in hopes the playwright might know where Miss Hammerschmidt bided, but I needed to sort out a few pertinent details.
“As I understand it, you came into the garden earlier today to heed the call of nature. Leander ventured downstairs on his own in pursuit, or perhaps to keep you in sight. Mrs. Danforth says she caught him wandering again and gave him at least the sharp side of her tongue, if not another smiting. Would he have brought his horse along on such a sortie?”
Miss Dujardin slanted a perplexed look at me. “I did not come into this garden this afternoon, my lord. I stay abovestairs with Leander to the greatest extent possible. I’ve started teaching him French out of sheer boredom.”
Mrs. Danforth claimed she’d caught the boy on the back terrace. She wasn’t about to lie for him, which meant Leander had been lying to her when he’d said he’d been following Miss Dujardin to the garden.
The rows facts and columns of observation weren’t adding up correctly. “How did you know he was missing?”
“We typically nap in the later afternoon. It’s too hot to tarry in the park at that time of day, though I try to get him there most mornings if his lessons go well. I attempt a second round of lessons after our nooning, but after that… I know he doesn’t sleep some days, but he plays quietly in his room while I have a lie-down. Routine can be a comfort when a child has known a lot of upheaval, and that quiet time in the later afternoon was a fixture of our days.”
“And when you went to check on him, he wasn’t in his room?”
“Correct. I’d left him alone for maybe half an hour at that point.”
This recitation made little sense, given Mrs. Danforth’s version of events. “Then he took up his prized horse, braved the lower floors on his own, crossed paths with the dreaded Mrs. Danforth on the back terrace, and told her a great bouncer regarding your whereabouts.” What possible motive could he have had for risking another skirmish with his own personal dragon?
“Leander can tell a fib when it suits his purposes. He’s not the sort of child who lies clumsily. That he’s good at dissembling alarms me, though he deploys the skill as a last resort.”
Miss Dujardin certainly knew her charge well, and she had taken on far more of the governess’s role than that of nursemaid. I ought to ask her when she’d last been paid, but that discussion could wait.
When I had periodically gone absent from Caldicott Hall as a boy, nobody had assumed I’d been abducted. They had instead concluded I’d run away from home, a puerile rite of passage apparently, or they conjectured that I’d become stuck atop a haystack or in some venerable tree.
“What of Leander’s soldiers?” I asked, naming the possessions the boy might well prize as highly as his stuffed horse. “Are they in their proper garrison?”
Miss Dujardin glowered up at the house. The windows reflected the slanting evening light, like blank eyes, and a raven marched about in an attic gutter.
“I still don’t know where his soldiers are, my lord. He won’t tell me. He says they are safe, where the enemy can’t capture them. That he has to hide his toys, what few toys he has left…” Miss Dujardin rubbed a hand across her forehead. “I cannot bear this. I cannot bear the pass we’ve come to.”
And yet, bear it, she would. I moved around to inspect the space behind the rain barrel and found nothing. The battlefield established earlier in the week was deserted, though under the lavender border, I found a skeleton force of three.
I hunkered to study the few pieces remaining. “He took his artillery and cavalry and left a trio of sentries posted.”
“He might have split up his forces, put some here and some there, lest somebody find one of his hiding places.”
I collected the sentries and put them in my pocket. “When would he have had time? You are with him when he’s away from his room, and while I know he slipped his forces into the lavender bed when I was on hand to distract you, on subsequent trips to the garden, you would have watched him closely.”
Miss Dujardin stared up at me. “What are you saying?”
“He was not kidnapped.” The realization brought both relief and renewed terror. “He has struck out into the world on his own, and we have less than an hour of full daylight before he’s alone after dark in London.”
Miss Dujardin looked up at the sky, her expression utterly bleak. I knew how she felt, beyond despair, and into the realm where tears and profanity were pointless.
“God help him.”
“First,” I said, “we need to dispatch those notes, then we need to review all the places he might try to reach on his own.”
Miss Dujardin stared at the two pieces of paper in her hand. “He never goes anywhere without me, and we have only been in London proper since Mrs. Danforth took us in. I have no idea… I have no earthly idea where he could be.”
Neither did I, but suffice it to say, locating the boy had gone from just barely possible back to unspeakably difficult, and we had roughly one hour in which to find him.
A search of the alley and stable took up twenty minutes and yielded no results. Miss Dujardin had agreed to remain at the house in case any reply arrived from Hyperia or His Grace, though no reply had been needed in either case.
I simply wanted to get her off her feet. The night might be long, and she was already on her last nerve.
“The lad used to ask me about the pub,” the footman Jones said as the shadows in the cobbled alley grew more ominous. “The Hare and Dog is right around the corner, but I don’t guess Miss ever took him inside.”
Women worked in pubs and, in some cases, would patronize them, but rarely without a male companion.
“What about the church?” Griffith asked as two lanky grooms made short work of evening chores in the stable. “Lad got drug to services regular enough.”
“Miss Dujardin inquired of Vicar,” I replied. “I assume the curate would have done a cursory inspection of the pews and loft.”
“But not the graveyard,” Griffith retorted. “Many a boy’s played hide-and-seek in a graveyard.”
“Not after dark,” Jones observed. “Not without his mates.”
Leander, as far as I knew, had no mates, no friends at all.
Throughout this discussion, Atticus had been patiently stroking Beecham’s neck and shoulder. The gelding was dozing with a hip cocked. Atticus looked drawn to me and more than a little anxious.
“You should get back to Waltham House before the light’s gone,” I said.
“You might need me to hold the horse.”
“The horse will stand until kingdom come, lad. Be off with you. Tell His Grace we’ve made no progress, but will continue to search.”
Atticus got a look in his eyes that boded ill for my good manners. “Search where, yer worship? You done searched the alleys, the neighbors’ yards, the nearest squares, the church, and halfway to perdition, but you ain’t found him. He mighta piked off to begin with, but by now, somebody has snatched that boy, sure as Beecham farts when he trots.”
I was assailed by the fact that I’d overlooked the obvious. I was trying to find a boy, a boy new to London and one with few allies. Atticus was such a boy, though he had the benefit of perhaps twice Leander’s years.
“Where would you suggest we search?” I asked. “Don’t turn up pugnacious on me now. I am asking in all seriousness.”
“Pug-what?”
“Difficult, bellicose, contrary. Where would you go ?”
He stroked the horse’s neck again. “To the park, I s’pose. You can breathe in the park, and it’s quiet. More like the country. People are happy there. They play with their dogs and chase balls and feed the ducks. London has one pretty, happy place, free to all, it’s the park.”
“Lad’s gotta point,” Griffith said. “Miss was forever taking the young master to Hyde Park if he’d made a good try at his studies. Got him out from underfoot too.”
“I like the park,” Jones said wistfully. “I go every half day. I try to walk along Park Lane if I have time after divine services.”
I recalled Leander wheedling for an outing to the park, and Miss Dujardin standing firm. The park was a reward and a refuge. An oasis of freedom, fresh air, and safety—from the boy’s perspective.
“Where else might you go, Atticus? If you didn’t know your way to the park, where would you go?”
He shook his head. “I know how to get there, and if I didn’t, any passing stranger would be able to tell me. Everybody knows how to get to Hyde Park, and it’s barely a quarter hour’s walk from here.”
“Very well. To Hyde Park.” The obvious next step, and I had missed that too.
We had enough light left to dash to the park and make a start on a search, no more. “Jones, please fetch Miss Dujardin. She’ll know the boy’s favorite haunts. Griffith, you and the grooms go ahead on foot. Send the men searching along the banks of the Serpentine and the Long Water. As hot as it’s been, Leander might have taken a notion to go wading.”
A potentially fatal notion.
“I’m coming too,” Atticus said. “You can order me home all you please, but I’ll just go to the park and hunt for the lad on me own.”
I wanted to hug him and to send him packing. “Up you go, then.”
Miss Dujardin bustled out of the house not five minutes later, bonnet ribbons neatly tied, gloves on, her velvet reticule in hand.
I roused Beecham to a smart pace, and we were soon tooling down Park Lane toward the entrance nearest Apsley House.
“Where do we search, Miss Dujardin?” I asked as Beecham clip-clopped along.
“Along the water. Leander loves the ducks and geese. We sometimes helped ourselves to a handful of grain when the grooms weren’t looking, and Leander delighted in the racket the waterfowl made in pursuit of a treat.”
The grooms and Griffith were already patrolling the paths along the waterways.
“Did you stick to one bank or the other?”
“The northern bank is our preferred haunt. We never wander as far as Kensington Gardens. Leander is getting too big and too dignified for me to carry, and the walk home always takes twice as long as the walk to the park.”
The boy’s father should have been on hand to piggyback him home, as my father, despite his lofty title, had occasionally transported me home from picnics at Caldicott Hall.
And if not Leander’s father, then a devoted uncle should have been pressed into service.
I drew the gelding to the side of Park Lane and brought him to a halt. As I leapt down, a female sort of person sashayed past the curricle, her perfume a hyacinth pollution upon the evening air. Her hems were modest enough, but her decolletage was in danger of losing the battle with gravity, and her hair was done up in a ridiculous confusion of ringlets and braids. She passed into the park, where she doubtless intended to ply her trade.
“We’ll need torches if we’re to search much longer,” Griffith said, trotting up on my right. He made a valiant effort to ignore the endowments of the woman parading along the walkway, while the two grooms trailing behind him succumbed to a bout of ogling.
Had I been that fatuous when my manly humors had been more in evidence? That stupid? I daresay I had been, and on more occasions than I was comfortable admitting.
“Fetch some torches.” I passed him over a few coins. “Tatts should oblige. Tell them a lad’s gone missing.”
Miss Dujardin and I made another pass on foot along the north bank of the Serpentine. We explored a few side paths, but as we were without illumination, and those paths became increasingly haunted by the park’s criminal and commercial denizens, I decided the time had come to send Miss Dujardin to safer surrounds.
“I don’t want to go back to Mrs. Danforth’s,” she said when I put my concerns to her. “That woman looks at me as if this is my fault, and it is, but it’s not all my fault.”
“If you will blow retreat, I can more easily approach certain parties who regularly do business in the park in the evening hours. You will be comfortable at Waltham House, or I can send you to Miss West.”
A presumption on my part, but I was confident Perry wouldn’t let me down.
“If you find Leander, you’ll take him to Waltham House?”
“Directly.”
“I don’t want to go.”
She cared for the boy, clearly, but the time had come for plain speaking. “You will slow me down, Miss Dujardin, and as the hour advances, seeing to your safety will become an increasing hindrance.”
I braced myself for argument and pleading—more wasted time—but Miss Dujardin studied the dark mirror of the water’s surface, then squared her shoulders.
“I’ll go to Waltham House.”
Thank the merciful powers. She trundled off with Griffith’s escort, and I accompanied them as far as Park Lane. Atticus was minding the curricle and yawning about every thirty seconds.
I passed him my flask. “How were the meat pies?”
“Not as good as Mrs. Bellassai’s, but good enough. I saved one for the lad, like you told me to.”
Shadows were forming into patches of darkness. A few of the more conscientious households along the street had already lit their streetlamps. Atticus drained my flask and shook the dregs into his mouth.
“If you were facing a night in Hyde Park, Atticus, and alarming sorts of people were occupying more and more of the paths and getting up to mischief behind the hedges, where would you hide yourself?”
Atticus capped my flask by banging his fist on the cork, then passed it back to me. “Not in the bushes, that’s for sure. Bushes got bugs in ’em, and gents and dogs like to piss on bushes.”
“Along a building, then?” Hyde Park had a few. Sheds, gazebos, arches, memorials…
“Rats like to scurry along buildings.” Atticus yawned again. “Lad’s probably catching a nap on some bench or in a tree.”
“The trees are too large to lend themselves to climbing.”
“No, they ain’t. Some fine climbing trees down this end of the Serpentine, along the short bank, just off the path.”
“How would you know such a thing?”
He grinned. “How’d ya think, guv?”
I tousled his hair. “Rotten boy. Don’t you dare eat the last meat pie.”
I jogged back the way I’d come, yelling at the two grooms to follow me. When I reached the point where the path diverged along the long northern shore of the Serpentine and the short eastern side of the lake, I took the eastern path and sent Griffith’s minions on to the next clump of trees along the northern bank.
“Leander, I know you’re up there. There’s a meat pie in it for you if you come down now, lad. Miss Dujardin is most concerned by your absence without leave, and I daresay Dasher is hungry for some oats.”
My heart sank when the only response to my call was a squirrel scampering across the path.
Well, damn. What had I expected? The boy had probably been snatched up within a quarter hour of passing through Mrs. Danforth’s garden gate. I subsided onto a bench that sat in near darkness and tried to make my tired mind think of next steps, possibilities, anything productive.
A small, thready voice floated down to me through the gloom.
“The trouble is, sir, I’m stuck, you see. And when I try to get unstuck, I get more stuck. I’m hungry and thirsty, and I have to wee, but mostly I’m s-stuck.”
Thank God. Thank God and all His angels, and thank my canny, stubborn little Atticus too.
I sprang up from the bench. “Fortunately for you, rescue is at hand. Shake a branch, and I’ll have you down in no time.”
“I really do have to wee.”
“Two minutes, lad. Just hold out for two more minutes.”
He managed, bless the boy, but it was a very, very near thing.