Chapter Seven
Harry’s account book was like the Spanish countryside, hiding salient facts amid miles of seemingly monotonous terrain. A region might be mostly given over to sheep farming, but one fellow’s riding horse was in a better trim than anybody else’s.
Was he the local informant, and if so, to how many sides of the conflict did he peddle his wares? Was he prospering because his information was reliable, or were all his lies about to catch up with him? Or perhaps he’d simply happened onto a thrifty equine specimen who kept well in sparse pasture.
Had a barn recently burned to the ground because of an unlucky lightning strike, or had the owner run afoul of Bonapartists, Spanish monarchists, or guerrillas loyal only to their brethren and their bellies? Who had been warning whom with the conflagration, and what had been lost in the blaze?
For years, I’d spent most of my waking hours on such puzzles, and now, as evening rain pattered gently on the garden beyond Waltham’s library, I pondered Harry’s expenditures. His most vexing entry—￡5 DC—had not been repeated, which might mean he’d paid a gambling debt, donated to a d ebtors’ c harity, or made a discreet loan to a friend.
Harry had been the sort to do all three.
A soft rap on the library door was followed by the butler’s appearance. “A caller, my lord. Miss Hyperia—”
Hyperia tacked around him as nimbly as a naval cutter heading for home port. “I realize this is a ducal household, Cheadle, but you’ve known me since I was in leading strings. We won’t need a tray, and I won’t be staying long.”
Cheadle sent me the look of a man trying to singlehandedly uphold the dignity of an august household and having a provoking time of it.
“I haven’t enjoyed supper yet, as it happens,” I said. “Two trays, Cheadle, if that won’t instigate a rebellion in the kitchen.”
“No trouble a’tall, my lord.” He withdrew, sparing Hyperia a glance of veiled exasperation.
“The heat wears on Cheadle,” I said. “Excuse his testiness.”
Hyperia peered at the ledger on the desk. “Cheadle is wroth with me because I’m calling at such an hour and without a chaperone. I didn’t want to bother recruiting Lady Ophelia for guard duty, my companion has been overtaxed by the heat, and what I have to say didn’t lend itself to a note.”
“Propriety’s loss is my gain.” To vastly understate the matter.
She looked more closely at Harry’s journal, but I hoped the genuine compliment pleased her. Her presence certainly pleased me.
“This is Harry’s handwriting.”
“You see before you his account book from the year without a Christmas. He paid his tithe to Bond Street and the other shops, tended to the household wages, stocked a generous larder and cellar, and otherwise kept the books, but I don’t see any indication he was keeping regular company with a specific woman.”
“And thus, not with Martha Waites?”
“No sign of her at all.”
Hyperia turned a page. “What of the payments to Clarissa? She was a hired escort, so to speak—at least to hear her tell it. None of the usual Ludgate shops appear on these pages, so I doubt Harry paid her in jewels.”
Why hadn’t I seen that? Could DC be Darling Clarissa ? “He might have paid her through the solicitors. A bearer bank draft.”
Hyperia took the seat behind the desk and turned another page. “Coin would have been less bother and more discreet, and it’s about Clarissa that I’ve come to speak with you.”
At the moment, I didn’t give two hearty profanities for dear, darling, dratted Clarissa. I knew only that I’d been missing Hyperia, and I hadn’t admitted as much to myself. A conversation with her would serve practical needs—to sort through the day’s developments, toss ideas about, and plan next steps. More to the point, I had missed the sight of her, the sound of her voice, the direct regard of her gaze.
I had missed her , and regardless of the news she brought, my spirit was calmer and happier because she was with me.
Our supper trays arrived, and we took them to the reading table by the windows. The last of the light was fading from the sky, and I’d lit only candles rather than sconces. A ducal household this might be, but funds were never for squandering.
“What of Clarissa?” I asked when we’d been left to consume our meal in cozy, scandalous privacy. “Has she called upon you?”
“She has not, but William Ormstead dropped by this afternoon.”
I speared a bite of cold potato salad. “Has he been dropping by more frequently?”
“Perhaps.” Hyperia considered a glass of hock. “Well, yes, though I suspect he’s gone chummy on me simply because so few other people are in Town. He and Healy get on well too.”
They doubtless got on like a house afire, drat them both. “Might Ormstead fancy your company, Perry?”
She took her time slicing off a bite of cold ham. “He might, and I find him agreeable, for the most part. What matters for present purposes is that Ormstead claims Clarissa is returning to Sussex the day after tomorrow.”
Ormstead sniffing around Hyperia’s skirts mattered to me a very great deal, but I was honor-bound to hold my tongue. He could call on her five times a day, and I would have no right to comment.
Clarissa’s sudden urge to travel was another matter. “Why leave Town now?” I asked. Clarissa was an earl’s daughter, of marriageable age and then some, and she’d been forced by finances to endure a surfeit of country life. “Why leave Town so abruptly when Reardon’s fortunes are beginning to rise? Who will escort her?”
“I thought she might ask you. It’s only a day’s journey each direction.”
“Perry, don’t you dare intimate, do not suggest, do not imply, that I am available to serve as her outrider. The summer sun is unrelenting, I am not recovered from haring all over the south coast on previous adventures, and I would rather not leave Arthur to his own devices just now.”
She sat back. “This has to do with the boy, doesn’t it? What have you learned?”
I reported status regarding Helvetica Siegurdson’s recollections and her possible resemblance to Leander, as well as the Duchess of Ambrose’s suspicions concerning Clarissa. I reserved a recounting of Miss Hammerschmidt’s call until after we had enjoyed liberal servings of raspberry fool.
“You are drawing a verbal portrait of Harry in a sense,” Hyperia said, scraping a final spoonful of fruit and cream from the bottom of her bowl. “He might have trifled with a lady, with his cook, with an opera dancer, with a seamstress known to the opera dancer, or with none of them or all of them. Who was the real Harry, and is he Leander’s father?”
“The ladies all seem to agree that he is.”
“They are a clever, determined lot, as you describe them, Jules. Any one of them might have caught Harry’s fancy.”
“Resilient,” I said, considering the gallery of candidates. “If they were men, we’d call them shrewd, but they are women, so the word ‘conniving’ has likely been applied to them. Do small boys like raspberry fool?”
Hyperia rose and returned to the desk. “In the general case, yes. Just as large boys do.” She resumed her seat and pulled Harry’s ledger closer. “He had such a tidy hand. Your writing has more personality. Your J’s would rule the world if you weren’t such a gentleman.”
That was precisely the sort of odd, insightful remark I could expect of only Perry. I abandoned the table and took a seat before the desk.
“I looked for patterns, for any disbursement that might have been to a lady in anticipation of an interesting event, particularly as Harry prepared to sail back to Spain. Now that you point out a lack of remuneration to Clarissa, I’m wondering if he truly purchased three sets of uniforms and so forth, or if two sufficed, and the rest of the money was only disguised as tailor’s expenses.”
“And by the way he crossed a t, or capitalized a word, Harry would have left himself a coded record very different from the one we think we’re seeing?”
“That would have been like him. Harry was inclined to complicate life and then enjoy grumbling about the challenge of coping with the tangles.”
She ran her finger down a column of figures, while I appreciated the garnet highlights in her hair and the silky curve of her cheek. My thoughts were not exactly sexual, but they were sensual. Perry was lovely, as a work of art was lovely and as a loyal, courageous, kind human heart was lovely.
Part of me was missing her—missing a future with her—even as she sat four feet away, scowling at an old account book. Bedamned to Ormstead and his polite social calls.
“Harry was a generous employer,” she said, turning a page. “Very generous.”
“I suppose temporary duty should pay more, especially when nobody wanted to be in Town that winter.”
She looked up. “Everybody wanted to be in Town that winter. The merchants were delighted, the hostesses, the coalmen … You were smart to stay out of it.”
Did you miss me? “I had work to do elsewhere. I’m hosting Leander and Miss Dujardin for lunch tomorrow. Part of me would rather be back in the Sierra de Gredos, setting snares for rabbits, instead of sifting through my brother’s past.”
“So you were hiding in Spain?”
“I bided where I was useful.”
She studied me, candlelight finding every pretty plane and hollow of her face. The ceromancy branch of the divination arts dealt with studying candles—their flames, the patterns of the wax, the behavior of the smoke—but I could read little in Hyperia’s expression.
“Were you hiding from me, Jules?”
“From French patrols, Spanish rebels, local Bonapartists, the elements. Harry sometimes. My own commanding officers if they were bent on sending me back out on a cork-brained assignment. Not from you. Never that.”
“Good.” She went back to her scowling perusal.
“Will you join us for lunch tomorrow?”
“Yes. Remind me to take up keeping house for officers on leave. Harry paid this Bleeker woman a small fortune.”
“Miss Siegurdson was complimentary toward her, said she tended to everything from stocking the decanters to keeping Harry’s bedroom fires…”
“Yes?”
Saint George and all his dragons. “His bedroom fires lit .”
“That’s a footman’s job, Jules. At the direction of the butler.”
I mentally reviewed my discussion with Miss Happy Belowstairs Siegurdson. “Harry hired no butler.”
“Why not? The holidays are a social time, and most male staff prefer to answer to a male superior.”
“More significantly, any footman would have enjoyed even a brevet promotion to the butler’s job.” The ducal household, between Sussex and Town, employed at least two dozen footmen. They often eyed the underbutler’s and butler’s posts covetously, assisted with polishing the silver, vied for turns escorting guests…
Why no butler? Why the lavish wages to Mrs. Bleeker? “Damnation. I don’t suppose you’ve come across a Mrs. Bleeker in your London travels?”
“I can ask at the employment agencies. You believe her to be another of Leander’s possible mothers?”
“Mrs. Bleeker’s wages were suspiciously generous, she warmed Harry’s slippers by the hearth, served him the occasional nightcap, and kept his bedroom toasty at all hours . She was either the most attentive housekeeper in the history of the post, or she was warming Harry’s sheets with her very person.”
“She might have simply hoped for a promotion to the ducal ranks when Harry decamped. Harry was one to allow himself to be cosseted.”
Oh right, or she might have been smitten with Harry—so many had been—and making overtures to which he was unreceptive, because he was already swiving half of London. And yet, the details of Mrs. Bleeker’s situation promoted her to the ranks of women who merited closer scrutiny.
“She had intimate access to him, she was on hand at the relevant time, she appears to have been paid for services beyond beating carpets and blacking andirons, and she was genteel enough to become a companion when she left Dingle Court.”
A weight of frustration bore down on me. The situation was growing more complicated, not less, and I had little more than a week to see Leander ensconced under the ducal roof, if that’s where he should be.
I did not doubt that Mrs. Danforth would put him on the parish, or Miss Hammerschmidt would go to the penny press if I failed to deal with the situation in a timely and appropriate fashion.
“We have a few days,” Hyperia said, getting up and coming around the desk to take the other guest chair. “Not long, but you can work wonders in a few days. After lunch tomorrow, we’ll call on Clarissa. Send a note to Lady Ophelia tonight with the pertinent facts and see what she can turn up. She hears all the gossip and knows more than she tells.”
“True enough.” My godmother was also the inspiration for many juicy on-dits, though her talent for causing tattle had waned in recent years.
“It was like this with the Makepeace house party, Jules, and like this with that business in Sussex,” Hyperia said. “Matters grow increasingly muddled until you sort them out. We will get to the bottom of Leander’s situation.”
“You use the plural. Good of you.” Eat your heart out, Ormstead.
She rose. “You didn’t plan to ask me to lunch tomorrow, did you?”
I was on my feet as well, and weary feet they were too. I was not the tireless soldier I’d been a few short years ago. “I didn’t want to impose.”
She patted my chest. “Next time, impose. I’m off to collect my footman from the kitchen.”
“Then collect him, or send Cheadle to break up the card game, but I’d like to walk you home. Consider it an imposition if you must, but I am asking.”
She studied me as if I’d called some great philosophical tenet into question, and I was inordinately concerned that she’d reject my offer. Whatever shortcomings I might have—and they were legion—I could be a conscientious and attentive escort, and for her, I wanted to be.
“Very well, then. See me home.”
We traveled arm in arm down the quiet streets, two footmen trailing us. I tried to simply enjoy Hyperia at my side on a damp, gusty summer evening, but I was too preoccupied with Leander’s growing legion of putative mothers to properly appreciate even that boon.
“Have you come to take the boy?” Mrs. Danforth posed the question before I could even introduce Hyperia.
“I have come to fetch him and Miss Dujardin for a luncheon outing,” I replied. “We will likely go for an ice thereafter, and then I will return them here. Allow me to introduce Miss Hyperia West. Miss West, Mrs. Danforth, who has graciously provided a refuge for Leander in his bereavement.”
“How generous of you,” Hyperia said with every appearance of sincerity. “How kind. In these times, so many would have turned their backs on a small child’s sorrow. You restore my faith in humanity, Mrs. Danforth.”
Mrs. Danforth would clearly rather have restored the tranquility of her household, but she nodded grudgingly.
“One does one’s Christian duty. Nonetheless, the child deserves to have his situation settled, one way or the other. ” She directed a housekeeper to send a maid for the boy and his nurse and kept us waiting in the foyer.
Hyperia engaged her on the riveting topic of how much to water hydrangeas, given the abundance of both heat and rain lately, while I noted a shadow of rising damp making inroads above the foyer’s flagstones.
Bad news, that. The umbrella stand had been positioned to hide another patch, and a potted fern obscured a third.
Leander came down the steps, holding the hand of a maid perhaps three times his age. “Good day, my lord,” he said, grinning at me. “I still like nutmeg on my chocolate.”
“Master Leander.” I bowed, though the boy really ought not to have addressed me until I’d acknowledged him. “Miss West and I are here to take you and Miss Dujardin to lunch.”
The maid dropped his hand, bobbed a curtsey, and withdrew into the house’s lower reaches.
“Can we go to Gunter’s?” he asked. “I had an ice there once. Miss had lemon, and I had chocolate.”
Mrs. Danforth scowled down at him. “Where is your nursemaid, young man?”
He peered up at her, and clearly the boy lacked guile, because his annoyance with Mrs. Danforth was evident on his face.
“She’s out. Today is her half day, and she went out. She said Pansy would look in on me, and Pansy just now came to fetch me.”
This recitation of facts sat ill with my hostess. “Out where? She’s keeping Lord Julian waiting.”
Leander’s chin acquired a stubborn angle. “Out. That’s all I know.”
“Leander,” Hyperia said, “perhaps you’d show me your room? I can read you a story while we wait for Miss Dujardin to come back.”
A fine notion. I wanted a look at the particulars of the Christian charity Mrs. Danforth was extending to the boy, and I also found it very odd that a nursemaid would take her half day in the morning and without informing Mrs. Danforth.
To that lady’s credit, Leander’s quarters were tidy, if cramped, and blessed with two windows. Miss Dujardin’s room across the corridor wasn’t any larger, and she had no window at all.
“This is my pony,” Leander said, taking from his pillow a ragged creature of a brownish hue with four legs and a recognizable tail. “His name is Dasher.”
Harry’s first pony had been Dasher, but then, the ranks of ponies were probably as rife with Dashers and Dancers as they were with Thunderbolts, Lightnings, and Crumpets.
“He’s very handsome,” Hyperia said, taking a seat on the cot. “Do you ever braid his tail for parade inspections?”
Leander plopped down beside her with no self-consciousness whatsoever. “I don’t know how to make a braid.”
“I’ll show you, and perhaps Lord Julian can find us a story to read while we wait for word of Miss Dujardin’s whereabouts.”
Mrs. Danforth was having inquiries on that topic made belowstairs and had waved us up the steps with no mention of a tea tray, lemonade, or other gestures of hospitality.
“Miss has my books,” Leander says. “She doesn’t want anything to happen to them.”
Meaning she did not want them to disappear to the used booksellers’ stalls in Bloomsbury.
Ye gods. “I’ll have a look in Miss Dujardin’s room,” I said as Hyperia carefully separated Dasher’s tail into three skeins.
I hadn’t intended to pry, but the opportunity to inspect Miss Dujardin’s personal quarters was too intriguing to pass up. Her room was orderly in the extreme, her narrow bed neatly made up, her four dresses hanging in a wardrobe missing one of its doors.
Two gray dresses for every day. One older frock in faded lavender with a wisp of lace about the collar, and a dress in light blue velvet with lace at both collar and cuffs. A Sunday item, or perhaps for occasions even more special than divine services. Miss Dujardin had a spare pair of house slippers, and she was apparently wearing her boots, wherever she was.
A workbasket, painfully neat, held a pair of dingy cotton stockings already mended once about the toes.
The wardrobe smelled pleasantly of lavender, despite the missing door, and lavender sachets hung from a sconce near the door. Nothing under the bed, where I half expected to find a battered valise, save for a plain porcelain chamber pot. A cloak too heavy for summer hung opposite the dresses, and a shawl had been folded on the vanity stool. The vanity itself was a rickety little relic, its mirror speckled and cracked.
Hairbrush, comb, and hand mirror likely dating from the last century. The washstand stood in a corner—no privacy screen for the nursemaid—and lacked even a cracked mirror. On the shelf below the basin, I found a tin of soap redolent of lemons and lanolin. A bottle of hair tonic, also bearing the scent of lemons, sat beside the soap.
No salve for the lips, no lotion for the hands. Nothing to darken the eyebrows or otherwise enhance a lady’s appearance.
I set the bottles back precisely where I’d found them.
The minuscule fireplace was swept clean, and the absence of both andirons and a coal bucket suggested that even on a chilly, rainy night, the nursemaid was denied a fire.
A spy had quarters such as these. On first appearance, Miss Dujardin kept the sort of Spartan chamber any domestic would maintain. Plain, tidy, sweltering in summer, frigid in winter, but treasured for the privacy it afforded—or would afford, had the door sported a lock rather than just a latch.
Except that nothing made these quarters unique to Miss Dujardin. No sketch of a cousin lost at Waterloo. No framed sampler from Proverbs. No bonnet halfway through a retrimming. The sole artifact of a personal nature was a Book of Common Prayer on the bedside table.
I opened it and read an inscription in a spidery hand: To my darling girl, on the occasion of her first communion. Love, Mama. The initials in the upper right corner were hard to decipher, MF or MP, possibly a faded MB. Certainly no D for Dujardin.
A prop, then, bought used and intended to assure anybody prying that here dwelt a good, trustworthy Anglican soul. I moved to the lone shelf of books, hoping for any clue to the truth of that person. I found only a picture book about a bear cub who ran away from home, Aesop’s Fables , a book of recipes for removing stains, and another book of medicinal remedies for female complaints. No inscriptions.
No lurid French novels either, not even a worn copy of one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s tales. Miss Dujardin had been in residence for more than a month, but her quarters stated clearly that she hadn’t expected to stay even that long.
I took Aesop with me back to Leander’s room, a sense of foreboding accompanying me across the corridor.
“I like the tale about Androcles and the lion,” I said, brandishing the book. “Perhaps Miss West will read that one?”
“I want a pet lion.” Leander bounced off the cot. “He would be very fierce and roar a lot and eat Mrs. Danforth up.” The boy made loud smacking noises and snapped his teeth together several times.
“She might give him indigestion,” I said. “Starch, lace, and hairpins probably don’t go down that easily.”
Hyperia tended to her braiding.
“He’d spit them out,” Leander said, making p-p-p-p noises as if spitting pips onto the carpet. “And Dasher would stomp on them.” Stomp, stomp, stomp.
There being no other place to sit in the room, I settled on the thin mattress two feet from Hyperia and patted the place between us. The situation was growing awkward. We weren’t precisely guests, but we were callers and Mrs. Danforth’s social superiors.
She was either without the first inkling of proper hospitality, or she was desperate to ensure we felt unwelcome.
“Your lion is an angry fellow.” I opened the book to a random page. “I wonder what has put him so out of sorts.”
“Maybe Mrs. Danforth hit him.”
Hyperia’s hands went still on Dasher’s tail of yarn. “I beg your pardon? Did Mrs. Danforth raise her hand to you?”
Leander turned away, but not before I’d seen that stubborn little chin quiver. “She said I was a disgrace to a Christian household, and I wasn’t to leave my room without Miss or Pansy, but Miss went out, and I had to use the necessary, and that’s in the garden. Pansy took my pisspot for washing, else I’d have used that. Mrs. Danforth oughtn’t to have smacked me.”
As a small boy, I’d earned regular swats on my little bum. Impertinence had been the usual charge. Climbing doorjambs in the formal parlor was impertinent. Tracking mud across Mama’s marble foyer twenty minutes before guests were due was impertinent. Farting in church was impertinent—and had won me some memorable bets with Harry.
I’d taken my punishments in stride, knowing they hadn’t been intended to harm me. A minor hazard of doing business, as it were, and proof that adults as a class had little notion how to motivate me to good behavior.
The effective torments had been Papa’s brooding silences and Mama’s cuts direct. If I was ever so fortunate as to become a father…
No point in pursuing that thought.
Coming downstairs to use the necessary—or more likely to search for an errant nursemaid—was not impertinent. Not even close when that nursemaid was Leander’s sole ally, in this household and in the entire world.
“Did leaving your room without permission get you a spanking?” I asked, idly flipping a page.
“She slapped me,” Leander said, miming a stout backhand followed by a forehand blow. “Both cheeks. Hard. I told her she oughtn’t to have done that and ran up the stairs. I thought she’d chase me, but Pansy came out and said the tea was ready, so I got away.”
“But you didn’t get to use the necessary,” Hyperia said. “Shall we tend to that now?”
I rose. “There’s a chamber pot in Miss Dujardin’s room. Nip across the corridor, and then we’ll be on our way. The hour is advancing, and you, my lad, are expected for lunch at Waltham House.”
“What house?”
“Where I’m living for the nonce. Miss West will join us, and I was hoping Miss Dujardin would as well. Is Friday always her half day?”
Leander watched while Hyperia finished her braid and used a lone strand of tail yarn to secure her work.
“Today is Miss’s half day. She said. She hasn’t taken a half day since forever.”
“Since your mother died?”
He looked decidedly uncomfortable at that question. “Since we came here. I don’t like it here.”
Neither do I . “Heed nature’s call, and then we’re leaving. Lunch followed by an ice, if we’re spared afternoon thunderstorms. Miss West, let’s be on our way.”
She replaced Dasher on the pillow and rose.
Leander snatched up the horse. “Dasher comes with me so nothing happens to him.”
Hyperia sent me a look: You have to get him out of here.
I had to get me out of there, too, and before I took to lecturing Mrs. Danforth about the stupidity of smacking worried little boys who did regularly have to pee.
We were soon in the foyer, waiting for the estimable Pansy to find us Leander’s hat, when Miss Dujardin emerged from the lower reaches of the house. She wore a straw bonnet, cream cotton gloves, and a plain brown cloak—no parasol—and carried a burgundy velvet reticule. Suitable attire if she’d been interviewing for a new post.
“My lord, good day. I see you are punctual.”
“We were a few minutes early, as it happens, and I was dismayed to think you might not be joining us.” Leander had been dismayed. I had felt the battle in him between the desire to leave the house and his dread of going anywhere without Miss Dujardin.
“As it happens,” Miss Dujardin said, “I have finished my errands on schedule and am prepared to accompany Leander on his outing.”
She’d cast herself firmly in the role of the child’s nursemaid rather than my guest, but I was too interested in quitting the premises to spar with her.
“My coach awaits in the alley.” I’d chosen the alley for its shade and because watering the horses was easier there than if I’d kept them waiting on the street.
When we’d crossed the garden, we found Atticus at his post, holding the onside gelding by the bridle, not that a sensible equine would be inclined to go anywhere faster than a shuffle in the heat, and not that John Coachman would permit naughty equine behavior in any weather.
“You have a carriage.” Leander gaped at the lesser of Waltham’s two barouches, an open vehicle with a bench before and two seats vis-à-vis. A commodious conveyance for seeing and being seen rather than for extended travel or protection from the elements.
“That belongs to my brother. I’ll hand the ladies up, and if you like, you can ride on the bench with John Coachman. My tiger is Atticus. He’ll ride up there with you because he’s learning to handle the ribbons.”
Whether or not I was Leander’s uncle, I could see that I’d just become the most exalted of men in his eyes. I handed the ladies onto the forward-facing bench and climbed in after them. Atticus and Leander bookended John Coachman, who was peppered with questions from his new best admirers, and off we trundled.
I was on the rear-facing seat, and thus I had a clear view into the stable that served Mrs. Danforth’s household. Inside the open barn door an old valise sat off to the side, bound with a single bright red strap.
An article I’d expected to find under a nursemaid’s temporary bed, rather than sitting in the shadows of a stable. Perhaps Leander had been right to fret over his nursemaid’s whereabouts, and now I was curious as well.