Chapter Three
“You make all these entries yourself?” I asked, closing the bound ledger book and rubbing my eyes.
“I am less likely to misconstrue my own handwriting,” Arthur replied. “Mama is a firm believer that the head of a household must know where the money is spent. She kept the books at Caldicott Hall until two years ago, at which point, I stepped in.”
The ledger book was green—Mama’s preferred color for domestic accounting—and embossed with the family crest, Virgil’s famous aphorism about love conquering all tucked beneath it where the family motto should have been.
Mama had given as good as she’d got with the old duke. Nobody crossed her lightly.
“You still allow the stewards to keep the estate books?”
“I do casual audits,” Arthur replied, rising and bringing the brandy decanter to the library table. “I’ve found only harmless errors, but I suspect that’s in part because the stewards know I’ll check up on them. You’ll be responsible for all the tallying that goes along with harvest.”
“I did a fair amount of quartermaster’s work after Napoleon’s first abdication.” Endless days behind a desk, burying myself in figures, trying to cipher my way past nightmares. “I’ll manage.”
Arthur poured two servings and resumed his seat at the head of the table. “You’ll bide at the Hall the whole time I’m gone?”
His travel plans were growing more elaborate by the day. An initial stop in Brussels, then autumn in Paris, Berlin, Prague, and Vienna. Budapest if the weather allowed, otherwise, he and Banter would be in Venice before winter set in, and from thence… Greece, the splendors of Italy, and in late spring, he’d make a leisurely progress across southern France to Bordeaux.
Or he and Banter might settle in Brussels and spend a year dwelling in domestic bliss, but the plan was to go everywhere, see everything, and return home, exhausted and appreciative of all Merry Olde had to offer.
I would be very much on my own, holding the reins in Arthur’s absence; but then, a reconnaissance officer was expected to be self-reliant and resourceful.
I took a sip of excellent brandy. “I will bide primarily at the Hall during your absence,” I said. “Clarissa was peculiarly unforthcoming this morning. She claimed to have forgotten about the only winter in memory when Parliament didn’t rise for Yuletide. She described herself as nothing more than a tailor’s dummy Harry trotted out for the supper waltzes and the carriage parade.”
Arthur wrinkled the ducal proboscis. “Harry claimed she was trying to interest him in marriage.”
Harry had claimed that German princesses (plural) remembered him fondly in their secret dreams. “She insists nothing intimate occurred between them.”
“Do you believe her, Julian?”
I considered the stacks of ledger books and what I knew of Clarissa’s past. “If she and Harry were lovers, that is no business of ours. Leander is unlikely to be her son, and it’s possible she just wants the whole interlude with Harry behind her. She suggested I talk to your staff, and that was good advice.”
Arthur had shed his jacket, his cuffs were turned back, and his spectacles had slipped halfway down his nose. He looked like our father, only more… elegant. More aristocratic, for all his dishabille. He would turn heads on the Continent, impress the hostesses and the diplomats. As a duke, he’d meet the occasional head of state.
And about damned time, too.
“You can talk to the staff,” he said, swirling his brandy, “but Harry didn’t bide with me that winter. I was more or less living in committee meetings or ensnared by Prinny’s faction into late dinners at the clubs. Harry wanted to be away from all that. I suspect he preferred to dwell someplace he could bring women and get drunk with his confreres, and my household would not do.”
A hint of hurt or bewilderment lurked behind that recollection. Arthur rose and picked up a candelabrum from the mantel, then perused ledgers marching along a shelf behind the desk. He extracted a volume and brought it back to the table.
“Harry set up camp in the house on Dingle Court. This ledger will cover the winter you’re interested in, and you should find the names of his staff wherever the wages are accounted. Our people might have kept in touch with some of them, or the agencies might know where they’ve been placed since. Harry was always conscientious about characters and severance and so forth, though nobody would expect an officer on winter leave to bide for long in Town.”
Arthur set the account book before me. The binding was red, in keeping with the fact that Dingle Court had been the traditional venue for ducal mistresses.
“You’re sure you don’t mind that I’ll be traveling for the better part of a year, Julian?”
“I will mind. If you don’t write regularly, I will track you down and join your party, and your duchy can tend itself.”
“Our duchy,” Arthur said, sipping his drink. “You will become the duke one day, unless this boy Leander turns out to be legitimate.”
“For selfish reasons, I want him to be legitimate.” I opened the Dingle Court ledger. “For the boy’s sake… He’s just a little lad, Arthur, happy to do battle with imaginary dragons and his indulgent nursemaid. His head is full of fables, and his happiness depends on an hour in the park after his sums are done.”
“A normal boy,” Arthur said. “I was never a normal boy.”
And Arthur had known that from a very young age. “You were not allowed to be. You were memorizing the royal succession while you were still in dresses and had no idea what a succession was, other than a list of odd names. You had no playmates. You never ran away from home. You probably didn’t sample Papa’s brandy because the purpose of forbidden fruit is to tempt small children to foolishness, and you were not permitted foolishness. You learned to ride like a Cossack not because children and ponies are a divinely ordained pairing, but because it was two of the clock and time for your riding lesson.”
Arthur took the decanter back to the sideboard. Was he a tidy soul by nature, or had a succession of tutors and governors birched any messiness right out of him?
“If Leander is Harry’s son,” he said, “legitimate or otherwise, we will not allow him to be victimized by schoolroom dictators and two o’clock martinets. He will be our nephew, and we will have the raising of him.”
Arthur was clearly smitten with that notion—at least in the theoretical sense—while I… “Children baffle me, Arthur. I commend the ladies for taking on the raising of them, because I have no clue where to start.”
“You might surprise yourself. That rascal you refer to as your tiger adores you. I’m for bed. Banter and I go for final fittings tomorrow. We’re sending some winter clothing on to Berlin, and one does want to be à la mode .”
“You are a duke. You set fashion, and Society follows your example. Why must I keep telling you this?” I’d never told him any such thing previously.
Arthur finished his drink and set the empty glass on the sideboard. “Then the new fashion is for grown men, for peers, to run away from home in their prime years, when a fellow can have a better time making a proper adventure of the undertaking. I really do appreciate your understanding, Jules.”
Perhaps Arthur had been at the brandy longer than I knew. Perhaps he was drunk on anticipated joy. Before he left the room, he squeezed my shoulder.
“Don’t stay up too late. You have an appointment with a lot of toy soldiers and an imaginary dragon or two in the morning.”
Another squeeze, and Arthur was gone, leaving me to the familiar companionship of the ledgers and the brandy.
I did not hold out much hope of finding Harry’s old staff, but the notion held merit, and I wasn’t yet ready to seek my bed. A humid breeze stirred the curtains, though the house was otherwise quiet.
The numbers, kept in Harry’s hand, seduced me. He’d spent prodigiously on claret at a time when the best red wines were hard to come by. M. Beaujolais had been a frequent recipient of his coin, abbreviated simply MB in later entries.
Mme Clicquot had received some payments as well. The widow Clicquot was mistress of a notable champagne vineyard, a lady whose products ought not to have been finding their way to England at all in 1811.
Shame on you, Harry.
Wages had been paid weekly to a staff of nine. Housekeeper, cook, scullery maid, two chambermaids, two footmen, a boot-boy, and a combination groom/coachy, but no butler. Mrs. Millicent Marie Bleeker had served as the head domestic, and the cook’s name was listed as Helvetica Ann Siegurdson—I pictured her wielding a meat cleaver to good effect—while everybody else had merited only initials and surname.
C. Cummings and L. Fielding had been the footmen, and they were more likely to have remained in service and in Town than the female staff. But then, Helvetica Siegurdson wasn’t a name quickly forgotten. Surely I could find one of them, and they might recall something of Harry’s guests during that winter.
I turned pages, seeing a window on my brother’s life latticed in columns and rows. The enlisted men were supposed to receive their new uniforms each year at Christmas—a tradition frequently honored in the breach rather than the breeches. The officers did likewise, though they paid for their own kit, and went home to London on winter leave or sent to Bond Street to have those uniforms made up.
Harry had replenished his wardrobe in triplicate, but then, he’d had independent means, unlike many who’d bought their colors. Three pairs of riding boots—a small fortune—and an enormous bill to the mercer.
Three new pocket watches, along with three compasses, three pairs of field glasses and shaving mirrors—signal mirrors, more like—and plenty of civilian attire too. Harry would pass variously for a merchant, a landed gentleman, a horse dealer, an Italian baritone… His disguises tended to be more stylish than mine, and he liked working in the towns and cities, while I preferred the villages and countryside.
I turned another page and came across expenses incurred at one of London’s more fashionable modistes. A milliner had got her fingers into Harry’s pockets, as had a lady’s glovemaker. Harry had made notes alongside his entries. Sunday finery beside one, in anticipation of spring beside another.
But whose Sunday finery, and who had made such a fetching picture in the spring of 1811? Or had the lady’s fashionable clothing become too snug by spring?
I was on the point of closing the journal, the examination of which had become more an exercise in sentiment than an investigative foray, when I noted an entry logged as ￡5 DC.
Cryptic, given that Harry had elsewhere provided myriad details not strictly necessary in an account book. I set the ledger aside for further study and made my way to my bedroom. A light shone beneath the door of the ducal suite across from mine, and quiet voices murmured in the gloom.
And then soft, shared masculine laughter.
I had never heard Arthur laugh, not even politely, but he was laughing now, and God be thanked for that.
I tended to my ablutions and lay down atop the covers. The night was close and hot, but one did not sleep on London balconies, and the heat had been worse in Spain. I was drifting off to sleep at long last when, for no reason at all, my mind presented me with the fact that a prospective groom in search of a special license paid five pounds for that article at Doctors’ Commons.
“My notes,” Mrs. Danforth said, handing over a sheaf of papers. “If I recall anything further, I’ll send it along to Waltham House. I’ve informed Miss Dujardin that she and the boy might well be changing abodes.”
My commanding officers, when sending me on a particularly difficult mission, had adopted Mrs. Danforth’s same air of let’s-be-off-with-you, nothing-further-need-be-said, despite endless questions remaining unanswered and haste being a certain recipe for disaster.
“No change of abode for another two weeks at least,” I countered, tucking the papers into the tail pocket of my riding jacket. “I do recall you allowing me that much grace to sort out the boy’s particulars.”
“Twelve more days, my lord. No more. I will not have my household become an object of talk.”
Mrs. Danforth was an obscure military widow living on an obscure street in a neighborhood nobody would call fashionable. I was tempted to allude to those facts, except that I knew all too well how easily a reputation could be tarnished, never again to shine as brightly.
“Leander will not be left here any longer than necessary. The nursemaid’s name is Dujardin?”
A nod. “She’s devoted to the boy, I’ll give her that. Spoils him, but her regard for her charge is sincere, and he’s quite attached to her. He would be, of course, what with his mother gone and no father, and I hope you will take that into account when you settle him elsewhere.”
I was to settle the nursemaid as well, apparently, though I would hardly leave the woman to starve. “Might I have a private word with Miss Dujardin?”
“Dispatch the boy to the kitchen for jam and bread. I’ll send Dujardin to you.” She rose and marched off, and while I wanted to be sympathetic to Mrs. Danforth’s circumstances, her put-upon, uppish airs made that difficult.
But then, she had no children to show for her years of loyal service in the ranks of military wives, and that—as I was coming to know—had to hurt.
Miss Dujardin and Leander appeared hand in hand a few minutes later. The nursemaid wore the careful expression of a domestic facing an interrogation, while the boy’s gaze was curious.
I rose. “Julian Caldicott, at your service.” Honorifics struck me as unnecessary in present company, particularly in a garden little bigger than a foaling stall.
Miss Dujardin curtseyed. “Leander, make your bow.”
The boy dropped her hand and complied. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Caldicott. I am Master Leander Merton Waites, at your service.”
The name, and confidence with which Leander introduced himself, gave me pause.
“Well done,” Miss Dujardin said. “Your soldiers are where you left them yesterday. You can play Waterloo.”
Children all over Europe likely knew the order of battle that day as well as or better than Arthur knew the royal succession.
“I’d rather we played hide-and-seek.”
She folded her arms. Just that.
Leander’s air of insouciance faltered. “I’d rather we played hide-and-seek, miss .”
“Your soldiers can play hide-and-seek,” I said. “Have them dodge the French patrols and then circle round to ambush them behind the rain barrel. Just don’t forget where you positioned your scouts. They should be on high ground, but not too far from the action.”
Leander stared hard at me. I looked for traces of Harry in his piquant little face, but found only a suggestion near the chin and in the earnestness of his gaze.
“I can use bricks to make high ground,” he said, “and I can make a bog, and the Frenchies will try to cross the bog, like the Jacobites at Culloden.”
“A fine plan.” If a bit ghoulish. Leander scampered off to make war on the French, and I gestured to a bench. “Shall we sit?”
Miss Dujardin perched on the very edge of the bench. She was the picture of domestic propriety, in sturdy gray twill, her collar the merest dash of lace. Her hands were folded primly in her lap, and her hair was tucked beneath a pristine cap.
Where to start with such a citadel to decorum? I took a seat on the opposite end of the bench. “The boy has a lively imagination.”
“Leander must often entertain himself. He hasn’t had many playmates.” Somebody was being reproached with that observation, and the child was being defended.
“He has you.”
She smoothed her plain gray skirts. The fabric was good quality, and the clothes fit her well. Not quite a uniform, more of a governess’s ensemble, despite the capacious mobcap.
“He has me for now. I did not know who you were, my lord, or what your errand was when you called two days ago. Mrs. Danforth saw fit to inform me of the details only this morning.”
Not simply decorum, then, but also affronted dignity. Splendid. “You were ambushed?”
She nodded. “Mrs. Danforth hasn’t had children. She doesn’t grasp that upheaval can be hard on the little ones. She herself cannot abide disruption, though. Leander just lost his mother. He has no memory of a father. If the chambermaid accidentally tossed out the boy’s favorite stuffed horse, he would be justified in becoming hysterical, and now… I am talking out of turn.”
Very much so, though perhaps she spoke out of fear. “You feel genuine concern for Leander, which I commend.” She was also judging her betters, but because her opinions matched my own, I could hardly castigate her for them. “He will be provided for, Miss Dujardin. Whether he is my nephew or simply the offspring of somebody my brother once esteemed, we will not allow him to come to harm.”
She tucked a coppery curl under her cap. “We?”
“We Caldicotts. We are few in number, but fiercely loyal.”
She remained demurely quiet, gaze on the uneven bricks of Mrs. Danforth’s terrace. My mother’s silences could take on the same dense, accusatory quality.
“What do you know of Leander’s antecedents?” I asked.
“His mother recently went to her reward, such as it was, and his father apparently perished in the wars.”
“Is Leander legitimate?”
“I don’t know. Mrs. Waites retained me when the wet nurse’s milk dried up. Leander would have been coming up on a year. He was taking his first steps, saying a few words. He could manage porridge and simple foods. The particulars of Mrs. Waites’s relationship with Leander’s father did not come under discussion.”
In the usual course, infants went to live with a wet nurse. In loftier households, the wet nurse bided with the family until her charge outgrew her services. For villagers and lesser folk, the baby was fostered out. Nothing unusual there, except that one could not foster out a child if one lacked coin.
“Is it fair to say you know Leander better than his mother did?”
She watched while, down the walkway, the boy was arranging bricks and dipping water from the rain barrel into a depression in the soil. His makeshift lake would be mud by the time he arranged his soldiers, but then, bogs were supposed to be muddy.
“Mrs. Waites loved her son,” Miss Dujardin said, “but her means became limited, and she had no family willing to acknowledge her. I was to say that Leander was her husband’s offspring, but as far as I know, she was married only the once, and her husband died in India well before Leander was conceived.”
“She never remarried?” This mattered above all else, in terms of the factual record.
That pale hand once again smoothed over drab fabric. “If she had, why continue to use her first husband’s name? If a ducal heir had proposed to me, do you think I’d disdain to use his name?”
The biddable nursemaid hadn’t always been in domestic service if she could challenge me with such a question. I had not admitted that Leander could be Harry’s son, but Miss Dujardin had stated the assumption plainly.
“You might avoid use of that ducal heir’s name,” I said, “if the fellow was a brute who’d shown only enough charm to manipulate you to the altar.” Harry had been many things and had had charm aplenty, but he’d never have raised his hand to a woman or a child.
“Can a ducal heir be a brute?”
“Yes, he can. Or a drunkard, or destitute and mean, though his unkindness leaves no marks.”
My reply gave Miss Dujardin pause, but not for long. “Mrs. Waites spoke only rarely of Leander’s father. Said the boy bore a resemblance to him about the chin and eyes, said the father was very determined on his own ends too.”
A polite way to say that Harry could be selfish and pigheaded, which was true enough. “Do you happen to know Leander’s date of birth?”
Leander ranged his men atop the bricks and dug a bunker behind which he positioned a lone scout. The French advanced single file down the walkway, all unsuspecting of the danger ahead. The scene was unsettling and all too realistic.
“We celebrate Leander’s birthday on September 12, my lord.”
Odd phrasing. “Was he born on that day?”
Perhaps watching the boy play so realistically at war upset Miss Dujardin as well, because her manner had become testy.
“I would not know that, my lord. If he wasn’t born on the twelfth, he was certainly born near that date. I can think of no reason why Mrs. Waites would have dissembled.”
I could think of one very specific reason. My grandfather had been born on Friday the thirteenth. His birthday had been celebrated by family tradition on the twelfth for the entirety of his life. Another ancestor, born the very same day Good Queen Bess had been gathered to her reward had similarly celebrated her natal day on March 23 rather than March 24.
A childish imitation of musket fire broke forth across the garden as Leander knocked over the French soldiers or sent them pelting beneath the lavender border. The English delivered a much more rapid volley than we’d been capable of in the field, and two Frenchmen fell to their doom in the temporary bog.
“He could well be a Caldicott,” I said softly as Leander’s men swarmed down from their lofty bricks and chased the cowardly French into the undergrowth.
“I beg your pardon, my lord?”
“That boy could well be a Caldicott. Arrangements must be made.” Was I pleased? Relieved? Or simply… baffled, to have come this much closer to acquiring a nephew? And what of the boy? How would he feel?
I would have to consult the calendar, but every instinct told me that September 13, 1811, had fallen on a Friday.
“The Caldicott family has a tradition of moving birthday celebrations from the actual anniversary of a child’s arrival if the more accurate date is ill-omened.”
Miss Dujardin’s expression suggested she did not care two rotten figs for Caldicott family tradition. “The boy’s name is Leander Waites, my lord.”
Leander marched his prisoners back to the scene of battle and arranged them in a circle around the bog.
“A name can be changed by deed poll. His putative father also had Merton as a middle name.”
“You cannot change that boy’s name without his baptismal lines.” Miss Dujardin was forgetting her place again, and she was right.
I brought my focus back to the puzzle of Leander’s legitimacy. His birthday fell within the relevant window, regardless of family traditions. The boy himself had blurted out his full name.
“Where was Mrs. Waites living when she hired you?”
The question provoked a puzzled frown. “Here, in London. Well, Chelsea, actually. She’d rented a cottage from a widow, more of a made-over carriage house, but snug enough.”
“Then the boy might well have been baptized in a London church. If I search baptismal records starting with the last quarter of 1811, I will eventually find the church where he was christened. I will begin in the neighborhoods on the southwest side of Town and work my way east and north. We can get the boy properly situated, and I’ll hire private inquiry agents to comb the records.”
Her pretty profile acquired a hint of mulishness about the jaw. “You will upend a boy’s whole life because of some tale about a family superstition?”
“How many families do you know with the same superstition?”
“Probably half of those with a child born on a Friday the thirteenth.”
Fair point. “How many give their sons a middle name of Merton?”
She treated me to another reproachful silence.
“Lord Harry claimed Merton among his middle names, Miss Dujardin. He was in London during the relevant time.”
“So was all of Parliament and most of polite society.”
Her recollection was clearly better than Lady Clarissa’s, who numbered among polite society’s ranks. “I grant you, the evidence is purely circumstantial, but it is convincing evidence.”
As I spoke, I realized that I had been convinced, but Arthur and any meddling authorities would want confirmation. Had Miss Dujardin simply stated the boy’s natal day, without embellishment, I would not have been half so certain. Had the boy himself not told me his middle name… London had been full of officers on leave, MPs, peers, their families…
Leander had been conceived during the most social winter in recent history, and yet, this call had yielded details that all but proved to me that the boy was Harry’s child.
Miss Dujardin—the sole potential witness in possession of the relevant facts—looked to be on the verge of recanting her recitation, though, and that would not do.